
Class 2 



Book 



,H 2 k 



GopyiiglitN . 



1=105 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSrT. 



What Career? 



TEN PAPERS ON THE 



CHOICE OF A VOCATION AND 
THE USE OF TIME, 



By E. E. HALE, 

AUTHOR OF " HOW TO DO IT. 




BOSTON 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1905 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 


Two Cocies Receiv€d 


JAN 2 1906 


A Copyright Entry 


/CLASS Ol XXc. No. 
COPY B. 



4? 



A^ 



*> 



Copyright, 

By Roberts Brothers. 

1878. 



The University Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 



s u> 



TO 

MY BRETHREN 

OF 

ALPHA DELTA PHI, 

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED. 

EDWARD E. HALE. 



Boxbuby, Mass., 

December 17, 1877 



CONTENTS. 

♦ ■ 

PAG* 

I. The Leaders Lead i 

II. The Specialties 29 

III. Noblesse Oblige 51 

IV. The Mind's Maximum 75 

V. A Theological Seminary 127 

VI. Character 155 

VII. Responsibilities of Young Men . . . 180 

VIII. Study outside School 204 

IX. The Training of Men 221 

X. Exercise 251 



WHAT CAREER? 



I. 

THE LEADERS LEAD. 

Ay Address delivered before the Convention op Alpha 
Delta Phi, at Williams College, May 24, 1877. 

TX 7HO are the leaders of society, gentlemen, 
and how shall they be found ? 
This question, in one way or another, is of 
course at the bottom of all questions of govern- 
ment. As we live, it is often vaguely and 
often falsely answered, because people are 
misled by the analogies of European litera- 
ture and history, — analogies which must de- 
ceive, in social conditions so utterly new as 
ours. Our President is not a king ; our people 
is not a third estate ; our churches are not 
hierarchies ; our aristocracy is not hereditary. 
There is no resemblance between the duty cf 
the governor of an American State and that 
l 



2 WHAT CAREER? 

of the prefect of a French department or the 
lord-lieutenant of an English county. For 
such reasons, it becomes impossible to trans- 
fer from the older systems of government to 
our systems even the commonplaces, or what 
are called the axioms, of their political and 
social economy. And the attempt to make 
such transfer, on the part of half- trained 
writers, confuses and in the end embarrasses 
our administration of our own affairs. It is 
indeed the origin of half that pessimism which 
tells us in each hour that we are going to 
perdition. A prominent English writer said 
to me once : " Of course you know that there 
never was any thing we call a nation which 
extended from one ocean to another." I said : 
" I know it very well ; but our exact business 
is to show that what we call a nation can 
extend from one ocean to the other." But I 
had to add, that " what we call a nation is 
something world-wide apart from what you 
call a nation, and that is the reason why you 
never understand us." I might have added, I 
Buppose, " why we never understand you." 



WHAT CAREER? 8 

This sort of vagueness, not to say misappre- 
hension, affects the question, Who are our 
Leaders ; where are they at work, and how 
are they to be found? Thomas Carlyle — the 
especial absolutist of our time — growls out 
his dissatisfaction with all democratic systems 
of finding leaders. Other grumblers and 
growlers of his own nation, or of other nations, 
take up the easy refrain, and on the same or 
on another key repeat the dissatisfaction with 
what is. I am afraid that young men who 
read the journals much, not having yet found 
out the best ways of saving time, are apt to be 
unduly impressed by the weeping and wailing 
and gnashing of teeth of those writers for the 
press, who find nothing good outside the walls 
of their own offices. In the vain attempt to 
apply European precedents to American real- 
ities, such writers, especially if they have been 
educated abroad, tell us, week by week, that 
the Pope is quite wrong, and the Patriarch of 
the Greek Church equally wrong; that the 
Roman Catholic Church is wholly wrong, and 
that Protestantism is not worth mention ; that 



4 WHAT CAREER? 

the Emperor of Russia is wrong, while the 
Sultan was never right; that Count Bismark is 
lamentably wrong, Marshal McMahon entirely 
mistaken, and Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone 
each as absurd as the other ; that General Grant 
was all wrong, and that Mr. Hayes is all 
wrong ; that no man of any sense cares for Gov- 
ernor Robinson or Governor Rice ; and that 
there is not a city in America which has any 
notion of what government is or should be. 
The oracles are dumb, the lamp of God has 
burned out, — if indeed there be any God, which 
they say is doubtful. There is no open vision. 
From such moanings unutterable the educated 
young men of America would sink back, de- 
spairing, but that always in the same issue of 
the same journal, whichever it may be, there 
appears one gleam of golden hope. For it 
seems that in that particular office, by the 
united graces of natural selection, of evolu- 
tion, and of accident, there is one clear fountain 
of absolute truth and absolute wisdom. From 
that office weekly will trickle forth rills of wise 
direction, sufficient for one week for the salva- 



WHAT CAREER? 5 

tion of the land. If only the people will 
subscribe liberally to this particular journal, 
whichever it may be, all will be well ! 

Now it happens, in fact, that our fathers, of 
the era of the Revolution and the generation 
after, relieved us from many of the European 
dangers and evils. Grant that we have many 
of our own: of course we have. Still it is a 
shame that we should be taught that the par- 
ticular evils of Europe are on our shoulders ; 
and that the great grievance of all in their 
affairs is a grievance in ours. The grievance 
in their affairs is doubtless what Carlyle says 
it is. "The man who can" he says, "is not 
king. He ought to be king. Canning, cunning, 
konig, — man who is able, — ought to be the 
man who reigns." You cannot say this is true, 
whether in England, in Germany, in Italy, or 
in Spain. You cannot say that the Prince of 
Wales, or the Emperor of Germany, or King 
Victor Emmanuel, or the King Alfonso is the 
ablest man in either country. If then you 
stick to the theory that the king is the ruler, 
you must own that the time is out of joint, 



6 WHAT CAREER? 

and that the world has not hit on a good way 
to find its leaders. Bnt when you come over 
to America, it is not the President who rules, 
it is not the governor of a State who rules. 
It is the people who rule. And though in 
England your mournful poet may sing of 
unknown 

" Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed ; " 

of " village Hampdens," or " inglorious Miltons," 
— it is by no means certain that we have any 
inglorious Miltons or village Hampdens. It is 
certain that our system attempts to keep open 
the lines of promotion, which the systems of 
the Old World generally try to close. Because 
we keep them open, — certainly so far as we keep 
them open, — we shall find the real correction 
and the truly conservative element in our 
affairs. I believe, gentlemen, that we shall find 
in our history, and in our present fortune, that 

The Leaders Lead. 

To justify this thesis will be my effort in 
this hour. 



WHAT CAREER? 7 

I. It will probably be found that in all his- 
tory Mr. Canning's epigram is true, — that the 
horse drags the cart, and the cart does not push 
the horse along. After the glamour of the time, 
— after the smoke and dust have passed away, 
history will probably always show that certain 
men and women, who, as the Book of Proverbs 
says, no man of their own time has much cared 
for, have still been they who have saved the 
city. Even in those complicated arrangements 
of the Old World, your Napoleon and Cromwell, 
your Calvin and Luther, your Hildebrand and 
other Gregories, — men who were not born to 
thrones, — have a very uncomfortable way of 
tumbling thrones over, and, if they choose, 
erecting others in their places. Take such a 
life as that of Bernard of Clairvaux. Not long 
after William the Conqueror landed in England, 
Bernard was born in Burgundy. A young 
man, he chose a monastic life. A young man, 
only twenty-five years old, he chose twelve 
companions, and, with their spades and hoes on 
their shoulders, they marched into a wilderness 
of banditti to found a convent. They sep- 
arated themselves from all command, you say. 



8 WHAT CAREER? 

They sank into lazy and selfish seclusion. 
That is because you take the word " king " as 
being the only word that means "ruler." In 
fact, Bernard was a born Leader. He could 
not help leading. From the Wormwood valley 
in which he settled, he called up the " Clara 
Vallis," — the Clairvaux, — which was, for cen- 
turies, the centre of light to Europe. From that 
centre he sent out like-organized emigration into 
a hundred other centres of barbarism and plun- 
der. Before he died, he was the centre of the 
education of his time : and that meant the gov- 
ernment, nay, it seems to have meant even the 
agriculture and art, of his time. The little 
kings referred their quarrels to this leader of 
men. Conclave after conclave asked him to be 
Pope. But he knew, as he said, that he was 
more Pope than the Popes he made. Such a 
man as that changes the social order of Europe, 
introduces a new civilization, starts crusades on 
their career whether of darkness or of light, 
sets up kings, and throws them down. Yet 
when you have to put him in a class, he is 
neither emperor, king, duke, nor prince. He 
is something much more than any one of them : 



WHAT CAREER? 9 

lie is a Leader of men. The Leader leads, and 
the " thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, 
powers," meekly and orderly obey. 

But it is not my business to show that the 
Old World offers to all men alike the field and 
chance for a noble ambition. The difficulties 
are legion which have been reared there, to 
prevent the man of native genius from making 
his way to the front. And the contrivances 
are endless, as all the satirists show, by which 
incompetent men are bolstered up to power, — 
the lame pigeon, as Paley said, taking the rule 
of the flock. I am very sorry for them. But 
my business is not with them. My effort now 
is to show that, thanks to the system to which 
we are born, which is so natural that we forget 
that it exists, these difficulties fall away with 
us, and these contrivances are futile. With us 
the lines of promotion are open. In that is the 
secret of our successes. To keep them open is 
the first duty of our self-preservation. Because 
they are open, and as long as they are kept 
open, with us 

The Leaders Lead. 

i* 



10 WHAT CAREER? 

There is a pathetic story of a lad named 
MacDonald, who was born in Oregon ; and who, 
before he was a man, was shipwrecked on the 
shore of Japan. According to the cruel cus- 
tom of the old government of that country, he 
was caged, in the province where his life was 
saved, and kept there as a prisoner indefinitely. 
It was while he was so held, that an American 
Commodore touched at Nagasaki, and in an 
interview on the deck of his own ship was 
struck by a Japanese official. The Japanese 
government was alarmed. They wanted to 
know just what they had done ; and they sent 
for young MacDonald to ask what was the 
grade of a commodore ; — how many grades of 
officers were below him. He told them, with 
precision, of sailors, midshipmen, passed-mid- 
shipmen, commanders, lieutenants, captains. 
Above these in their order, he said, was the 
commodore. Then they asked how many 
grades were above a commodore. It was before 
the times of admirals, and young MacDonald 
told them of the Navy-Board, the Secretary 
of the Navy, and the President. 



WHAT CAREER? 11 

" 4 And who is above the President ? ' I told 
them," said he, " that the people was above the 
President. But of that they could make 
nothing." 

" Of that they could make nothing ? " No : 
of that they could make nothing. Men trained 
under a pure feudal system, of which the late 
Japanese government gave the finest illustra- 
tion to our time, never can make any thing of 
this central principle. I do not remember any 
writer of note in England, in our time, who has 
succeeded in grasping this idea. The popular 
conception given in the English books is, that 
our system is an elective monarchy with fixed 
periods of reign. The analogy is constantly 
sought between the President of the nation, 
and the king of a kingdom. There is no 
analogy. The President is the servant of a 
sovereign. The king is a person, who, however 
selected, after he is selected, is the fountain of 
honor, and at least the arbiter between the 
leading subjects. The distinction between a 
citizen and a subject is equally wide. In the 
feudal or European systems, no man may do 



12 WHAT CAREER? 

any thing unless he is permitted. In the 
democratic or American system, any man may 
do any thing unless he is forbidden. The 
difference is as great as that between starlight 
and noon. In Germany, I may not live in a 
town twenty-four hours without asking per- 
mission of the police ; I may not build a carriage 
unless I have a permit as a carriage-builder ; I 
may not write a recipe unless I am licensed as 
a physician ; I may not tell you that you sung 
b flat instead of b natural unless I am licensed 
as a music-teacher ; nay, I may not preach the 
very gospel of good tidings unless I am li- 
censed as a preacher. But in America I may 
preach, if you will listen ; and if you will not 
listen, I may preach to the winds. I may build 
as many coaches as I like, only if the wheels 
are not round the people will not ride in them. 
The function of oversight or command with 
us is in the hands of the people, unorganized 
and without form; while under those systems 
of government it belongs to the political au- 
thorities. 

From this it results that fully nine-tenths 



WHAT CAREER? 13 

of the functions of political government in the 
Old World are retained here by the people, — ■ 
by the sovereign, — in his own hands. Only 
one-tenth, then, of the force, talent, or genius 
needed for political administration in the Old 
World is required here in the same service. 
Whole bureaux or departments of administra- 
tion in the service of the Old World are un- 
known in our arrangement, and only one-tenth 
goes there. We need no department of worship, 
for the people administers the Church. We need, 
in most States, no department of the higher 
education: the people administers the colleges. 
Generally speaking, we need no department of 
commerce, or of agriculture. We need but a 
small military bureau, because the army is not 
one-twentieth part of the army of any other first- 
rate power. The people builds the railroads, the 
steamships, and orders the agricultural contests, 
the rewards, and inventions. Generally speak- 
ing, we need no department of fine arts or public 
amusements. The people builds the Museum, 
arranges the School of Art, crowns the painter 
or the sculptor. The people opens the Lyceum 



14 WHAT CAREER? 

the Theatre, or the Opera, and the people closes 
them. 

What men choose still to call " the Govern- 
ment" or "the Administration" reduces itself 
to what has a mere handful of attributes, if con- 
trasted with what Government must claim in 
absolute or in feudal systems. Let us not be 
deceived by the accident of a name. Let us 
not suppose that because we call the bureaux of 
political administration " the Government," it 
is only they who govern. And let us not make 
the mistake of the Old World critics, of sup- 
posing that it is among them only that our 
leaders are to be found. 

II. In simple society, the Leaders, of course, 
come to the front, — 

" Of native impulse, elemental force." 

It will be conceded, I believe, that this hap- 
pened a hundred years ago, in the Revolutionary 
times. The land had no lack of leaders then: 
that is conceded. We are far enough away 
from those times to see who they were. They 
appeared when they were wanted ; and they 



WHAT CAREER? 15 

did what they had to do. They led ; and, where 
they led, men followed. All this is the easier 
to see, because the pretenders — the men who 
could not lead — are clean forgotten, as we look 
back. Time teaches history well. Time shows 
us the leaders; and we need not distress our- 
selves in looking for the failures. 

And these leaders, whence came their commis- 
sions? Samuel Adams, Washington, Franklin, 
Greene, Morris, and a hundred others who led 
this land as it needed to be led, — what brought 
them forward? Ask, rather, what could have 
kept them back ? Is it any vote of an Assembly 
that directs Samuel Adams to insist, through 
and through, on Independence? Is it any he- 
reditary right which puts him in a position to 
maintain it? He has that word to speak: he 
speaks, and men are compelled to hear. So of 
Washington, so of Greene, the commanders of 
your armies. No man will pretend that it needed 
a commission from the Assembly of Virginia, or 
from that of Rhode Island, to make those men 
your leaders in successful wars. What changed 
Henry Knox, the Boston bookseller, into the 



16 WHAT CAREER? 

engineer in command of your artillery ? What 
so taught him that he 

" Created all the stores of war " ! 

Had you to wait till such a man was born in 
6ome predestined succession? Or had you to 
wait till he was trained to that service by a se- 
ries of red-taped and decorous promotions? Not 
a bit of it! You needed him, and you found 
him. Your lines of promotion were open, so 
that nothing checked him. For that purpose, 
as the event proved, he was your leader: and 
the leader led ! 

This is conceded, I say, for times of exigency, 
of great trial. " These are the days of mira- 
cle, " men say. The knot deserves solution, 
and from the skies some god descends. But 
then they turn to peaceful times, and they claim 
that the principle will not apply. For instance 
(and for this purpose it is a very striking in- 
stance), men urge the three administrations 
of the Virginian dynasty of Presidents ; begin- 
ning with Jefferson, and running down, 

" Fine by degrees, and miserably less," 



WHAT CAREER? 17 

till it ends with James Monroe. Or, if you 
please to make a point even finer, you may taper 
it with the reign of John Tyler. And sceptics 
say to you, " Are these your leaders ? Where 
did they lead you ? " Well, it is true that, of 
the last two persons I have named, most men 
in this assembly perhaps would say nothing, — 
good, bad, or indifferent, — simply because men 
remember nothing about them and have nothing 
to say. Nay, it is true, I suppose, that Jefferson 
himself had made his last gift to the people of 
this land, when he had well announced the prin- 
ciple I am maintaining, — namely, that to the 
people as sovereign may well be entrusted, with- 
out intermediate delegation, by far the largest 
share of the people's own affairs. Grant then — 
what I suppose is true — that for four and twenty 
years at the beginning of this century, from 
1801 to 1825, the so-called heads of this nation 
led it in no direction. Grant that neither of 
these three Presidents has proved in fact to be a 
leader. Grant that no principle for which they 
struggled has proved to be worth a straw, and 
that every measure for which they contended has 



18 WHAT CAREElt? 

proved to be a vanity. The one great event of 
Jefferson's reign, the acquisition of Louisiana, 
is no work of his policy. It was the suggestion 
and the work of no less a man than Napoleon 
Bonaparte. 

" I have given England a rival," he said to 
Marbois, when he signed the act of cession. 

All this is simply to grant that the chief 
servants of the people, in those four and twenty 
years, were not its leaders. Is that so strange ? 
Are wise men often led by their servants? 
Were not the people led all the same ? Why, in 
those very years, here was Eli Whitney leading 
them in the development of the new product, cot 
ton, which gave to this little line of sea-board 
colonies (for they were still such) the great coun- 
terpoise in the necessary exchanges of the world. 
Here were such leaders as Hopkins, of Newport, 
and Emmons, of Franklin, at work in their 
Spartan studies, leading the speculation of the 
men of thought and of religion over the land, 
as they weighed out in their balances the very at- 
tributes of the Almighty. Here again was Rob- 
ert Fulton leading it steadily forward, though 



WHAT CAREER? 19 

the land did not know that it was led, by his per- 
sistency in his great invention, without which, 
indeed, that whole purchase of Louisiana was 
almost valueless, — an invention which, in its 
application there alone, called into existence 
half a continent, whose harvests this day feed 
half a world. Such men as Allston were lead- 
ing the country to triumphs of art. Such men 
as Andrew Jackson were leading the Western 
pioneers, and teaching them the terrible might 
of this land for war. Such men as Channing 
were opening a new page before men's eyes as 
to the relations of man with God, and God 
with man ; were leading men 

" Nearer, my God, to thee." 

Could a land be better led? And who 
named these leaders ? What commission did 
they need from this or that Board of returns ? 
What herald's certificate did they need of their 
hereditary right to command? They led, be- 
cause they were leaders. And where they led, 
men followed ! 

It is the custom of our time, — I am sorry to 



20 WHAT CAREER? 

say that it is the custom of occasions like this, — 
to lament that the scholars and men of letters 
of the county are not placed in places of politi- 
cal administration. Has the history of the 
country showed that it needed its first ability 
at Washington? Were such men as I have 
named, — such men as Whitney and Fulton, 
such men as Channing and Hopkins, — wasted 
because they were not in the Senate or in the 
Cabinet ? Take such a life as that of Francis 
Wayland, who for a quarter of a century directed 
the education of thousands of young men in 
Brown University : will any one seriously say 
that it would be better for this country to-day, if 
he had spent those years in the Senate chamber 
at Washington? May I not ask, even in this 
presence, without impropriet} r , whether such a 
name as that of Mark Hopkins will not go 
down to posterity with fresher laurels and with 
more certainty of fame, because he has been the 
foster-father of the pupils of this Alma Mater, 
than it would have earned in any forensic strug- 
gles, or in any legislative arena? Or, in one 
word, is this people short-sighted? Men are 



WHAT CAREER? 21 

apt to say that they are too shrewd. Does not 
this people know where it most needs service ? 
And if we find that great men, unselfish men, 
thoughtful men, and men of genius, — men of 
a pure ambition, and of strong resolve, — do not 
choose the career of administration for their 
career, have we not reason to think that they 
know the field of fame and the field of duty as 
well as we do ? 

Let me adduce a single instance of a single 
detail of administration, which has proved of 
great importance. The system of the issues of 
bank-notes in this country requires that their 
amount shall be regulated by a deposit of gov- 
ernment stocks, not held by the bank officers, 
but placed in the hands of the public adminis- 
tration. This principle, first tried in New York 
in 1838, was copied in many other States, and 
borrowed by Sir Robert Peel in England, in 
1844. It is now the basis of the National Bank 
circulation of America. Who is the author of 
it ? The author was the President of Columbia 
College, who proposed it in his lectures to his 
seniors, and demonstrated its fitness. One of 



22 WHAT CAREER i 

those seniors afterwards introduced it into the 
legislation of New York. From the system of 
New York it passed into the legislation of the 
world. The improvement was needed, and it 
came. Can you suggest any possible system 
for the choice of your rulers, in which it should 
have come more easily ? 

III. It will happen, of course, that there come 
crises of importance, when the political admin- 
istration is the pivot on which all interests turn, 
and the welfare of the country hinges. Wisdom, 
and the first wisdom ; prudence, and the first 
prudence ; courage God-born, — is then needed 
by the officers in that service. Never fear, when 
that moment comes, but that they will watch 
the people, and obey the Leaders of the people, 
whether the Leaders be in this office or in that, 
or in none ; whether they wear this, that, or an- 
other crown of honor. What is Abraham Lin- 
coln's great honor, but that he understood the 
instincts of the American people, knew what 
it wanted, what it meant, and what it would 
do ? In point of fact, you find pessimism and 



WHAT CAREER? 23 

despair among those persons who see least of 
the real people of this land. The men who 
see only the drunken class of foreigners in Bos- 
ton, in New York and Chicago, may well be ir 
doubt as to our political institutions. But you 
will notice that that doubt is never shared by the 
men who meet, whether on the stump or in daily 
converse, the freeholders of the Western States, 
— the men who have made their own houses, 
their own farms, their own schools, their own 
churches, their own laws. They know that 
such men will make their own officers, and will 
unmake them. 

Yes, and more than this : those officers, when 
made, be the name President, Senator, Secre- 
tary, chief clerk, or under clerk; be he head 
of a bureau, or the lowest messenger boy of a 
porter, — those officers listen obediently, take to 
heart, digest, and obey the directions of the 
Leaders of the people, be those Leaders where 
they may. It is some unknown penman in his 
closet ; it is some Lowell singing a song ; it is 
some Emerson dreaming a dream ; it is some 
Moody moving a multitude; it is some Tom 



24 WHAT CAREER? 

Scott annihilating time ; it is some Sampson 
organizing emigration ; it is some Phillips on a 
rostrum ; or it is Mark Hopkins in this pulpit. 
The officer of the administration sits at the centre 
where a thousand mirrors reflect, where a thou- 
sand telephones repeat the words, and, like the 
obedient genie when Aladdin rubs his lamp, the 
officer of administration starts up, to say, — 

" I HEAR, AND I OBEY/' 

IV. Gentlemen, I will not leave this subject, 
addressing as I do the chosen representatives 
of so many of the most favored young men of 
the Northern States, without offering a word 
to them of practical suggestion. Take it, in 
Alpha Delta Phi, as the counsel of an older 
brother. 

In this business of the choice of a career, 
which occupies you already, you will defer to 
the last possible moment mere study for your 
specialty. A specialty there must be at last, 
but put off as long as you may your special 
preparation. Distrust all charlatans who tell 
you that they have a patent process to fit you 



WHAT CAREER? 25 

for any one career in life, — whether they call it 
a Commercial College, a Normal School, or a 
double-combination-refined Elective, — without 
broad Liberal Culture as the basis. Do not 
listen to the man who advises you to go into 
the business of making weather-cocks and 
steeples for churches, without building towers, 
and walls, and strong crypts, and foundations 
underground. 

Then, when the profession is chosen, and 
prepared for, consecrate yourself to God as his 
servant in it, that its work shall be done well. 
" Be ye perfect, even as your Father who is in 
heaven is perfect." That is the rule. Whether 
you open a copper mine in Michigan ; whether 
you plough and sow and harvest a thousand 
acres in Illinois ; whether you organize labor, 
and make cosmos out of chaos in Louisiana; 
whether you preach the gospel of Christ in 
some lonely village in the mountains ; whether 
you wait for clients who will not come, but 
prepare, while you are waiting, to unravel the 
knot of Gordius himself, — whatever you do, 
do that work well. Do it as a Leader does it. 

2 



26 WHAT CAREER? 

This country has founded these colleges, it has 
endowed these professorships, it has selected 
you to be students, that you may be its edu- 
cated leaders. Gentlemen, do not be false to 
her ! Lead }^ou will, if lead you can. See tha< 
you are leaders, by doing well what you have 
to do. 

I do not say that you are to avoid what is 
called Public Life. I say you are to enter one 
of its duties or another, as it may happen. For 
the truth is that you are in it, of course, if you 
do your duty. Men, trained as you are, speak 
easily when you have any thing to say. God 
forbid that else you should speak at all ! Men, 
trained as you are, write simply what you have 
to teach. It is your fault then, so far, if the 
Press, where you live, falters, or does not say 
what it might do. A free press, and an open 
rostrum, is the privilege of course of every 
educated American gentleman. Whoever else 
in this world complains that he cannot move 
men as he should, it is not men to whom are 
open avenues like these. 

Do well what you do. And do it conscious 



WHAT CAREER? 27 

that you ought to be Leaders among men. It 
is said to be the privilege of the young Ameri- 
can that he may be what Miltiades was, and 
Alcibiades, — a founder of a State, if he choose, 
Gentlemen, this founding of a State does not 
require us to cross the mountains. Wherever 
our lot is thrown, we may dig deep for the 
foundations, and build solidly the walls of the 
institutions which are to stand. And whether 
our names perish or are remembered, such in- 
stitutions, in the days that are to come, will be 
the monuments to those who come after us, 
that these men builded well ! 

And, above all, do not blow your own trum- 
pets ; nor, which is the same thing, ask other 
people to blow them. No trumpeter ever rose 
to be a general. If the power to lead is in you, 
other men will follow. If it is not in you, 
nothing will make them follow. It is for you 
to find the eternal law of this universe, and to 
put yourself in harmony with that law. Speak- 
ing more simply, it is to find God, and to work 
as fellow-laborer with Him. Do that, and you 
may afford to be indifferent, who else works 
with you. 



28 WHAT CAREER? 

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control: 
These three alone lead men to sovereign power! 
Yet not for power : power of itself would come 
Uncalled for. But to live by law, 
Acting the law we live by, without fear ; 
And, because right is right, to follow right,— 
Were wisdom in the spits of consequence." 



WHAT CAREER? 29 

II. 

THE SPECIALTIES. 

TOHN MILTON returned to England, from 
his foreign travels, just as England was on 
the edge of civil war. In France and in Italy 
he had been welcomed with enthusiasm. He 
had been fairly petted by scholars ; he had been 
jealously watched by cat-like inquisitors, afraid 
that he was budding heresies into the true vine ; 
he had been serenaded by musicians ; he had 
been suDg by poets ; he had been beloved by all. 
But Milton would not stay to be petted or flat- 
tered. The thunders growled in the horizon of 
England ; the batteries were builded which were 
to open on the English Sumter; and the true 
Englishman knew, the true Christian knew, that 
in such an exigency his place was home. He 
left sunny Italy for foggy London ; left flattery 
to find abuse ; left play for work, and work the 
hardest. He had- been graduated at the uni- 



30 WHAT CAREER? 

versity a few years before. I may say that, 
when he turned his back upon Italy, his last 
vacation was over, and the real commencement 
of his life had come. 

I may, then, fairly allude to his life as an 
illustration for some inquiries which we will 
make as to liberal study, such as that to which 
the readers of this book devote themselves. 
Here is the man on the whole most distinguished 
among men of our race, if, in our estimate of 
distinction, we are to give a fair estimate to per- 
sonal purity, to moral greatness, and to intel- 
lectual power. Of all men who have spoken 
our language, Shakspeare and Milton are the 
two whose loss, if we can conceive of it, would 
be the most fatal ; and, of these two, John 
Milton is the man who, in thought and action, 
in character, in politics, in his hope and effort 
for the coming-in of the kingdom of heaven, — 
say, in one word, in his religion, — represents 
the idea and the prophecy most dear to America, 
and especially to young America. Some illus- 
trations drawn from that master life ought to be 
of use to young America to-day. 



WHAT CAREER? 31 

John Milton was the first scholar of his time ; 
he was the first theologian of his time ; he was 
the first statesman of his time ; he was the first 
poet of his time. 

He was the first scholar of his time. When 
Charles the Second, fleeing into exile, wished to 
establish his cause before Europe, he retained 
the person then accredited as the first man of 
letters in Europe, Claude de Saumaise, to write 
out the justification of Charles I., his father. 
At the order of the Parliament, Milton replied. 
He rode over Saumaise in their tournament, as 
Charlemagne or Roland would have ridden down 
and ridden over Don Quixote. And the name 
of the showy scholar, who knew, men said, every- 
thing worth knowing, exists to-day in the drear- 
iest corner of the dreariest cyclopaedia, only 
because Milton honored him with a reply. 

Milton was the first theologian of his time. 
Not even his friends who made the Westminster 
Confession ; not even such sweet spirits as Her- 
bert and Vaughan and Chillingworth and Taylor, 
who in an opposing camp showed their unity of 
the spirit with those who overthrew the crown 



82 WHAT CAREER? 

and the throne ; not Hooker, Baxter, and Law ; 
nor, on our side the water, not any Cotton or 
Davenport or Mather or Williams of them all, 
— have so held the faith of the world, have so 
swayed its devotion or so guided its prayer, as he 
who invoked the Holy Spirit for his muse, and 
taught all men the music of the first evening 
hymn. 

Looking back upon it all, we have a right to 
say he was the first statesman of his time. 
Cromwell and the rest were trained in that 
rough school of statesmanship which does not 
miss its mark. Like our own dear Abraham 
Lincoln, when the common sense of the people 
pushed them on, they found out how to lead. 
There was no lack of will, and they found out 
the way. But when they had to defend in let- 
ters the work that they had done ; when, as 
against a defeated church, or a throne over- 
turned, they had to justif}' in eternal argument 
their cause, — whom had they to turn to but 
John Milton? 

That he was the first poet of his time, the 
world allows. There are not wanting those who 
say he was the first poet of all time. 



WHAT CAREER? 33 

Now, what was the training which stood Mil- 
ton in stead for service so various to the world ? 
What were the early studies wHich laid the 
foundation for work so distinguished, — work in 
lines so different, which was, however, work so 
bravely, nay, so completely done? There are 
ugly proverbs which say that a "Jack at all 
trades works ill at all." That may be true of 
trades : clearly it is not true of the nobler range 
of service. How was Milton trained in boyhood 
and in youth, that, when a man, he might serve 
his country and his God, whether as advocate, 
whether as theologian, whether as statesman or 
as poet? The answer is in familiar words. As 
boy and youth, thanks to a fond father's wis- 
dom, Milton had the most generous, the broadest 
culture England or Europe had to give. He en 
joyed what we rightly call a liberal education. 

The world was then what it is now, in the 
habit of men's minds and in the drift of their 
ambitions. There is no doubt, therefore, that 
John Milton and his father were surrounded with 
people who advised some other training. They 

2* 



34 WHAT CAREER? 

urged, I do not doubt, what people now call a 
specialty; that this young man should be early 
trained to some special pursuit, trade, or calling. 
As time passed on, I do not doubt that they 
pointed out the success, the brilliant success, of 
this or that specialist, as illustrative of the value 
of their counsel. The chief contractor who 
made Cromwell's powder, for instance (there 
must have been such a man, though history has 
forgotten him), — the master manufacturer who 
made the powder which Cromwell's soldiers 
kept so dry, and burned to so much purpose, — 
was, doubtless, in the London of that day, a per- 
son of more mark and note than John Milton. 
He had wrought on his specialty, and had 
wrought on it well. He had made a good con- 
tract, he made good powder, and he got good 
pay. History has forgotten him ; but I dare re- 
construct history so far as to say that I am sure 
he rode in his carriage, while Milton went afoot ; 
that his wife had laces and silks fit for an em- 
press, while Milton's wife spread thin butter on 
thick bread for hungry schoolboys. I think the 
powder-contractor and the poet may have known 
each other at school. I think he may have 



WHAT CAREER? 35 

nodded good-naturedly to Milton, as they met 
some day at the government offices ; and I can 
hear the contractor saying to himself, with con- 
temptuous pity ; " That is what comes of the 
classics and the mathematics, Christ College and 
the university ; and my coach and four here are 
what came of my specialty." Yet, for all that, 
if we had to choose between the two lines for 
son of ours, we should not choose the special 
training; we should choose the liberal education. 
For we should say : " It is perfectly certain 
that the powder manufacturing will be done ; it 
is not perfectly certain that, without watchful 
care and delicate nursing, the world will get its 
science, its statesmanship, its theology, or its 
poetry." About the methods in life there need 
be no fear. The doubt and danger are about 
the principles on which all methods depend. 
The methods of life are all that the specialist 
fully learns. The man of liberal education is 
studying its principles. 

It is unquestionably true that, with the im- 
mense enlargement of human knowledge, the 



30 WHAT CAREER V 

several sciences part so widely that no man can 
pretend to master them all; and only the merest 
charlatan professes the knowledge of the detail 
of every vocation. Still it is as true as ever, 
first, that all science involves a knowledge of 
fundamental and essential principles, and that 
the man who is not trained and habituated in 
these will be a mere dabster and empiric, even 
in the method of the special science which he 
has chosen. It is true, again, that each science 
is to be investigated and explained by the same 
eternal laws of truth and methods of reasoning 
as every other ; and the specialist who under- 
takes to study or to teach without habit and 
experience in these laws of truth and methods 
of reasoning, breaks down again as dabster and 
pretender. Once more, it is true that, as the 
unity of Nature asserts itself, and the correlation 
of one force with another, that man succeeds 
best in interpreting Nature in one of her phases 
who can best interpret her in another. This is 
the man who, from the breadth of his education, 
can tell something of the harmony of things, of 
the cosmos of the universe. He succeeds in his 



WHAT CAREER? 37 

specialty just in proportion to the breadth of his 
general education. 

Yet it is necessary to say this, and to illustrate 
it by such memories as those which tell us to 
what education we owe John Milton, and how 
great the loss would have been had we special- 
ized him into a scrivener ; because, in the rush 
of our time, even the colleges and universities 
have been invaded, and the old narrowness of 
the specialty is here and there proclaimed anew, 
as if it were some new discovery in education. 

When we come to examine this tempting and 
specious proposal, does it amount to any thing 
more than the old temptation, that the child of 
God shall use the heavenly power God has given 
him by setting it to make bread out of stones ? 

What do we say of the same proposal when it 
is presented a little earlier in men's lives ? 

In my own home, the city of Boston, there is 
an annual expenditure for the education of chil- 
dren of about a million and a half of dollars. 
The poorest child may take the advantage of 
this expenditure till he is eighteen years of age ; 
and the methods are so arranged that he may, 



38 WHAT CAREER r 

if he choose, enter with good instruction on 
many of the lines of study pursued in most 
colleges. In spite of this generous provision, 
however, the larger part of the children leave 
school before they are twelve years old. They 
do this that they may acquire certain specialties. 
It is now the specialty of selling lozenges, or 
matches ; it is now the specialty of leasing 
opera-glasses for the evening ; it is now the 
specialty of what is called a cash-boy in a large 
retail store. It is not an apprenticeship, which 
educates a boy for higher life : at twelve, he is 
too young for that. It is only a specialty which 
enables him to earn, week by week, about as 
much as will pay for his food. 

When we see this in the case of the little boy 
or girl, we all regret it. There is then no ques- 
tion that the decision of the parents is wrong. 
By all means in our hands we attempt to change 
that decision. In Boston, we are at this mo- 
ment trying to introduce into the school system 
such technical education in sewing, in carpentry, 
and other useful arts, as may persuade short- 
sighted parents to keep their children at school 



WHAT CAREER? 39 

a little longer ; for we think even half a loaf is 
better than no bread. We do not do this be- 
cause we like to do it : we accept it as the neces- 
sity forced upon us by the determination of 
ignorant parents to gain the immediate return 
of bread and butter for the education which is 
given to their children. We see that the longer 
we can put off the acquisition of the specialty, 
the better. 

This principle, which is acknowledged by all 
in the case of boys and girls, loses none of its 
force when it is applied in the lives of young 
men and young women. Of course, in civilized 
life, each man, sooner or later, must have his 
special training in the service which he is to 
render. But the precise object for which we 
have founded colleges is to give the liberal and 
broad foundation on which that training is to 
be based. And the rule of life might be stated, 
almost without an exception, that the longer the 
special training could be postponed, so the gen- 
erous preparation were still in progress, the bet- 
ter for the man, and the better for mankind. 

The fine and analytic division of labor for 



40 WHAT CAREER? 

which the specialist pleads, results, he thinks, 
in a certain improvement in the quantity or the 
quality of the world's manufacture. If one 
man always does one thing, and another man 
always does another thing, each man growing 
perfect in his specialty, the result will be, we 
are told, better pins in your pin-factory, more 
sheetings from your majestic mills, finer type 
for your newspapers, and Remington rifles more 
highly finished in your armories. All this is 
very possible. But the argument forgets that 
this world was not created for the manufacture 
of pins, of sheetings, of newspapers, or of rifles : 
it was created for the training of men. And 
the man is made more perfect and more, not by 
his deftness in this handicraft, or his knack in 
that trade ; but as one part of his being is thor- 
oughly wrought in with another part, body with 
mind, and mind with soul. 

The great modern patron of that system of 
industry which makes each man do what he can 
do cheapest, and divides labor so that one man 
shall make the heads of pins perfectly, and shall 
be capable of nothing else ; that another man 



WHAT CAREER? 41 

shall point them perfectly, and be fit for nothing 
else, — is Adam Smith. It might be enough to 
say that, if Adam Smith's theory could have 
been properly carried out, he would have spent 
his life, not in writing treatises of political econ- 
omy, but in fishing for herrings on the shore of 
Scotland: that being the industry for which 
Nature seems to have best fitted that region, had 
not the restrictions of government or civiliza- 
tion introduced other life there. Adam Smith 
is himself, then, an illustration how much the 
world gains when the boy or the man is trained 
to some broader and higher life than the mere 
specialty to which circumstances, or what people 
call " nature," would have directed him. Have 
we not, in our own history, had instances, — 
instances enough, to teach us what the country 
gains by training its citizens in the broader cul- 
ture ? Like the old Greek culture, it enables 
them to turn to any service. What is the whole 
tenor of the history of the war? Who were 
our diplomatists, — our Adams, and Marsh, and 
Motley? They were men who had been trained 
in the broader culture, and took up the specialty 



42 WHAT CAREER? 

of diplomacy as a matter of course, just as 
Themistocles led a fleet without having been 
trained to the specialty of a sailor. The special 
accomplishment, indeed, is only charlatanism, 
when it is not based on knowledge of the prin- 
ciple employed. Such is the rule-of-thumb 
reckoning of the seaman who does not know 
why his latitudes and longitudes come right, 
and is wholly the slave of his process. 

It was my fortune, once, to sit for several 
days by the side of the late Governor Andrew, 
of Massachusetts, while, with skill and success 
which I will not pretend to describe, he presided 
over a large, excited assembly, which, but for 
his admirable gift, would have been stormy. 
When all was done, I ventured to felicitate him 
on his success. " I think I have succeeded," said 
he ; " and I believe it is because, in all my life, 
I have only for three or four hours been in the 
chair of any assembly. I believe it is because 
I know nothing of the technics of parliamentary 
law. I mean," he added, with earnestness, 
" that I have been trying all through these days 
to apply the principles of justice, of truth, and 



WHAT CAREER? 43 

common sense, in the forms, which were of 
course familiar to me, of deliberative assem- 
blies." I could not but contrast that verdict 
with the verdict of my distinguished kinsman, 
John P. Hale, who stood with me one day, in 
the gallery at the Capitol, as an acute parlia- 
mentarian, — who has thus far never been any 
thing but an acute parliamentarian, — dissected 
some point of order to the bottom. " I would 
not," said Mr. Hale, " know as much as that 
man knows of parliamentary law, — no, not if 
you gave me the world ! " Take that as a not 
unfair contrast of the difference between prin- 
ciple and method, if, by any misfortune, either 
must be learned alone. 

The man who does not understand the prin- 
ciple will constantly be blundering in his method. 
The amusing stories of the blunders of the ac- 
curate Chinese imitators are illustrations. But 
more than this, and worse than this, the spe- 
cialist who has not laid a generous foundation 
for his art cannot explain it to another ; cannot 
wisely conduct the experiments for advancing 
it : he can only repeat the processes to which 



44 WHAT CAREER? 

he himself is bred. The hackneyed anecdote 
says that Mansfield told the Indian judge, who 
had not been trained in the principles of law, to 
make his decisions boldly, and they would be 
right ; but to beware how he gave his reasons, 
for they would surely be wrong. Precisely so : 
the mere specialist cannot give his reasons. He 
has to work by a recipe ; and what becomes of 
sjich work ? It was such work which the arti- 
sans of old time wrought in, — in the lost arts, 
— over whose monuments we are left to wonder. 
Such workmen learned the process, but they 
were powerless to explain the principle ; so the 
abiding or eternal element was gone. The sci- 
ence ceased to be a science : it became an art, a 
knack, a secret, a memory, a shadow, — and 
then was gone for ever. 

Of modern science, on the other hand, the 
glory is, that it is built up on certain eternal 
principles which have found their formulas in 
what we call laws. A knowledge of these laws 
leads to the true experiment, and to the simpli- 
fying of science. All true science is seeking to 
make science simpler and simpler : it is seeking 



WHAT CAREER? 45 

to find the general principle of which these spe- 
cial arts are only the illustrations. The great- 
est victory of modern science — the correlation 
of physical forces — is an exquisite instance 
of the answer given to men who were able to 
interrogate Nature, not with one but with many 
questions. And the bold suggestions and fasci- 
nating generalizations of the most distinguished 
naturalists of our time, — of the Darwins and 
Huxleys and Tyndalls, — are gifts to us from 
minds which have been trained, not in one line 
of research, nor in two, but in many : I might 
almost say in all. Their generalization takes 
its value from the range of their observation. 
Then the statement of it is intelligible, because 
they have not disregarded intellectual sciences 
of analysis, of investigation, and of argument. 
And, once more, their methods are intelligible 
because there is, and they know there is, a prin- 
ciple behind. 

The truth seems to be that, for all these 
reasons, we should be glad in every case to post- 
pone the training for the specialty as long as 
possible. We are to make the studies in prep- 



46 WHAT CAREER? 

aration for it broad enough to train every fac- 
ulty of body, mind, or soul. It is only in the 
lowest grades of life that we do not find fault 
with the absence of either side of such training. 
We do not expect, perhaps, that a hod-carrier 
shall move gracefully, or speak fluently, or talk 
without profanity. But just so soon as life calls 
for leaders, just so soon as a crisis comes, so 
soon as education, or men of education, are in 
question, — we ask that body, mind, and soul, all 
shall be quite ready for our service. 

Does any one venture to make what men call 
the crucial test the test of success in war ? If 
you inquire there, our own experience is all on 
one side. The education of West Point, which 
has given such vigor to our armies, is thoroughly 
liberal, and by no means technical or special. 
What men write English like your West Point 
army officers? What men better understand 
the relations of science with science? Nay, 
what men have been more successful in their 
practical interpretation of constitutional law? 
And if you will ask the most successful of them 
as to what is the best preparation for West 



WHAT CAREER? 47 

Point, they will tell you, without exception, 
that the best introduction to West Point is 
the full training of one of our colleges. And if 
you look outside West Point, in the army, the 
verdict is the same. What men rose to rank 
most distinguished, and won the love as well as 
the honors of the country, as did the men whom 
the colleges had trained, not for one service 
only, but to be ready for whatever call of duty ? 
Let me indulge a personal regard, and speak 
with a regret which is not personal but national, 
in naming for my own Alma Mater our Lowell 
and Wadsworth. Or let me speak for the coun- 
try when I name men still living, — Hayes and 
Terry, and Butler and Chamberlain, and Hawley 
and Howard. Did not such men lead their sol- 
diers under fire more cheerfully, because every 
memory of old heroism and storied victory was 
theirs, — the memories of Mantinea and Ther- 
mopylae and Lutzen and Naseby ? Did they 
not care for their soldiers more tenderly because 
their eyes had overflowed when they read of the 
gentle ministries of St. Louis and St. Vincent ? 
Did not they rule conquered cities more firmly 



48 WHAT CAREER? 

and more wisely because they had early learned 
how to love a Curtius and to scorn a Verres? 
Nay, such men died more easily, the eye of the 
body closed with one smile more tender creeping 
over the cold features, because, as they died, 
they remembered what Harvard and Yale and 
Brunswick and Lewis ton and Dartmouth had 
taught them in their boyhood : " Blessing and 
honor indeed, that a man may die for his coun- 
try!" 

But I do not choose to discuss these ques- 
tions on the strength of any illustrations, how- 
ever pertinent or strong. I am addressing 
young men whose lives are consecrated to 
liberal study, in colleges founded for liberal 
study, or preparing for them. No college can 
pretend to liberal study unless it is baptized 
in the free thought of its founders. Addressing 
them, I need only refer to the central demand 
of all Christian education, — the demand made 
by him who was a scholar before he was an 
apostle ; who, in the schools of Jewish thought, 
and even from the teachers of Gentile wisdom, 
had learned what the wisdom of men had to say 



WHAT CAREER? 49 

in these things. It is St. Paul who rises above 
the wisdom of the flesh to speak to you in the 
words of the Spirit. It is Saint Paul who says, 
in words which might be well taken for the 
eternal motto of a new-born college, that the 
aim of all life, the object of all training, is that 
we may come unto a perfect man: eh avbpa 
reXelov, — " Unto a perfect man ! " 

It is not simply the training of the voice to 
speak ; it is not simply the training of the eye 
to see ; far less is it the training of the fin- 
gers of the hand to this service or that toil. 
It is that we may come unto a perfect man. 
The whole body, soul and spirit, are to be 
presented blameless, — the body, by those ex- 
ercises and by that temperance which come 
from the wisdom that is first pure ; the mind, 
by that discipline which shall quicken fancy, 
shall strengthen memory, and shall clear argu- 
ment from sophistry. And the soul, the infinite 
child of an infinite God, is to be trained in 
faith and hope and love : in faith to look above 
the world ; in hope to look beyond time ; in 
love to look outside its lesser life, in that com- 



50 WHAT CAKEERV 

munion in which we are one with all God'a 
children, one even with himself. This is the 
standard, which the great Christian apostle 
proposes for your education. Try his experi- 
ment, and look forward to nothing less than 
this ultimate blessing. Then let life offer what 
it may ; let the special duty be here or there ; 
let the hand be called for, or the head, or the 
heart ; let it be words of conviction, or deeds of 
valor, or prayers of faith, which the world 
needs, — we are equipped for the one call or the 
other. We stand not hampered by the little 
habits of some petty training ; we stand forth 
ready, — ay, ready, the willing sons of Almighty 
God, strong in the liberty in which Christ has 
made us free. 



WHAT CAREER? 51 



III. 

NOBLESSE OBLIGE. 

An Address delivered before the Annual Convention 
of Alpha Delta Phi, May 18, 1871. 

TVTEARLY twenty of the chief colleges of 
America assemble here to-day. The 
vision of a far-sighted man, who thought it 
possible to unite the educated men of America 
in a certain unseen tie of friendship, is so far 
accomplished. The fittest solemnities of such 
an occasion would be, perhaps, a generous 
rivalry of letters between the institutions rep- 
resented. As Yale and Harvard, Amherst and 
Brown, meet at Lake Quinsigamond to test 
muscle and endurance on the water, what if 
A. A. $. should institute such games as those 
in which Herodotus and Pindar won victories 
in the days of laurels ? — if here, not one orator 
spoke alone, nor one poet sang, but if from 
every Alma Mater there were a lyric ; or if he 



f>2 WHAT CAREER V 

who had composed a history first published it 
to the world by reading here a chapter, and if 
we awarded to the fittest the first wreath of the 
crowns of thirty centuries ? Well, if from one 
Sybaris or another, it prove that one Herodotus 
or another among you, gentlemen, have this 
chapter of history in his pocket, or if one Pin- 
dar or another is ready to sing his lay, my 
friend the poet, and I, the more prosaic spokes- 
man, will not delay them long. It is ours to 
introduce the feast of learning, which, if we 
adopt that custom of the Alpha Deltas of the 
Isthmus, will continue, I think, for many days. 
I will be satisfied, in such preface, to speak only 
as one of so many representatives of the seats 
of learning. I will not pretend that we are all 
scholars. At the bottom of our hearts we know 
that none of us deserve that name. But I will 
speak to men of the liberal professions, as one 
who has had a liberal education. To education 
in the liberal arts, in the humanities, our col- 
leges are pledged and our fraternity is conse- 
crated. By education to the humanities, and 
in the liberal arts, our lives have oeen blessed, 



WHAT CAREER? 53 

we are the men we are, and we enjoy what we 
enjoy. In daily life we may be hewers of wood 
and drawers of water ; but we hew and we 
draw with a certain divine energy, and can 
make the humblest duty shine. Nay : this also 
is true, that from the moment when we elected 
liberal study for our study, the liberal arts for 
our arts, the liberal professions for our callings, 
— the whole community combined to help us 
on. For us it has endowed its Yale and its 
Cornell. For us it has founded the Astor 
Library and the Franklin Academy. For us 
it established in every new State marked out 
upon the map in the wilderness such a foun- 
dation for a university as no emperor of 
them all ever gives to letters. We then, as 
men of the liberal professions or as those who 
look forward to them, consider, almost of 
course, when we meet together, what are the 
essential attributes of these professions, and 
what we owe, in e very-day life, to Church a ad 
State, which have vied with each other in es- 
tablishing them and maintaining them. 

Noblesse Oblige ! — Our privilege compels us f 



54 WHAT CAREER? 

This was the battle-cry with which the Duke 
de Levis, one of the old regime of France, tried 
to quicken the new noblesse, created by Napo- 
leon, and to point them their duty in the State. 
The French dictionaries of to-day will tell you 
that it is an " old proverb." The idea is as 
old and as new as the word of Him who said, 
he "who is greatest among you shall be your 
servant." But this was not an idea believed 
in by the old noblesse of France. And its 
revival in new expression, when Napoleon tried 
to renew that nobility, marks well enough the 
period in modern history, when the world was 
becoming so far Christian that men of great 
opportunities were all taught that they had 
great responsibilities. The Count Laborde is 
my authority for saying that this noble Chris- 
tian axiom is in form thus modern. 

The old noblesse of France never made public 
expression of the idea. But the motto illus- 
trates fairly enough the responsibility which, 
in all countries and in all times, is on the lead- 
ers of the people. In our country, in our time, 
it is the responsibility which rests on the men 



WHAT CAREER? 55 

of liberal culture and of the liberal professions. 
Public spirit, which is the life-breath of the 
Commonwealth ; publicus spiritus, the breath 
which, if it cannot draw, it is stifled and dies ; 
public spirit, which colors red the lazy life- 
blood of the State, gives it its oxygen, gives 
it quickness, gives it victory, — public spirit 
will so quicken it, if we do our duty, speak our 
word, put our shoulders to the wheel. If we 
fail, that public spirit pants heavily and slowly. 
For the men of liberal culture, of the liberal 
arts and professions, — for the men who have 
had such advantage as the training of the 
higher humanities attempts to give, — I say all 
these advantages demand of us special sacrifices 
in the public service ; that we quicken as we 
can the public life ; that we live as we may in 
a public spirit. Noblesse Oblige ! Each gift 
that the past has given to us is pledge for our 
discharge of the common duty. 

I. If I had no other reason for saying this, I 
should be tempted to make it the subject of my 
address to-day, because of the habit bred among 



66 WHAT CAREER? 

persons who do not know what liberal culture 
is, of reducing all art, study, philosophy, and 
religion to what the Germans call bread-and- 
butter vocations. When the Saviour of man- 
kind entered upon his work among men, the 
arch-tempter of mankind tried the first of dev- 
ilish wiles upon him, by trying to persuade him 
to debase the life divine by some selfish miracle 
which should make bread for his own personal 
hunger. The same tempter offers the same 
temptation to each child of God this day. And 
in the several voices by which the Father of lies 
addresses men, he tries to make them believe 
that according as they succeed in coining the 
divine gift, or in exchanging it for bread, or 
palace, or fine clothing, or other personal lux- 
ury, in that proportion have their lives suc- 
ceeded. Thus they will tell you that Demas 
has made a good thing of it because he sold his 
article in the " Review " for two hundred and 
fifty dollars. Thing, indeed ! They will tell 
you that such or such a clergyman preached so 
many sermons in a year, and that the treasure r 
of his church paid him such or such a salar» t 



WHAT CAREER? 57 

that, therefore, each sermon was worth so many- 
dollars, so many cents, so many mills, and so 
many infinitesimal fractions. They will tell 
you that the charming little bas-relief by Gre en- 
ough, in whose simple composition lingers a 
prayer — only not spoken in words — which for 
century upon century will lift spirits eternal 
nearer heaven, sold for only five hundred 
dollars; while the piled-up bronze of some 
Alexander the copper-smith, which insults high 
heaven in its angles, shocks low earth even in 
its tawdriness, and is destined to be cast into 
bell-metal as soon as the Right shall triumph in 
any happy revolution, — they will tell you that 
this piled-up hideousness cost half a million 
dollars, and is therefore a work of art of a 
thousand times the value of the other. By 
such absurd and forced analogies, all borrowed 
from the world of hogsheads and tierces and 
tons and quintals, do men degrade the aspira- 
tions and the victories of the only life that is 
life ! Now, because this vulgar talk creeps into 
the journals and into general society, it seems 
fit to present the true purpose and motive of 

3* 



68 WHAT CAREER? 

the liberal professions and the liberal arts, in 
a meeting of men who are pledged to them. 
We are not hirelings in our service. Noblesse 
Oblige! The very privileges which are con- 
ferred upon us compel us to do our duty. The 
endowments of the colleges, — every luxury of 
letters, — this freemasonry which makes us 
friends here, though we never saw each other's 
faces; every privilege of our lives as men of 
liberal training, — involves duties to the State 
and to mankind. 

II. What, then, are the distinctions between 
a guild of craftsmen and a guild of men of 
liberal training ? What account is to be given 
of the distinctions which we enjoy, as men of 
liberal culture, and which we know that we 
enjoy? The mock-modesty which pretends 
there are no such distinctions is but folly. 

I do not speak first of the principle involved. 
Before we examine that, we shall notice two 
external and visible distinctions. 

First, The liberal professions admit no secrets 
in their methods. 



WHAT CAREER? 59 

Second, In these professions, the compensa- 
tion rendered is not computed with any relation 
to the service performed. 

The historical distinction first to be noticed 
is that the professor, or the master of liberal 
arts, by whatever name he may be called, 
mediaeval or of our own time, has no secrets 
in his calling. I suppose, if we cared to trace 
the history of language, we should find in this 
distinction alone the origin of the word "lib- 
eral" as applied to the freedom of art, — of 
science, — or, in general, of vocation. 

Thus the great distinction of the artists to 
whom we owe the new birth of fine art in the 
middle ages is in the loyalty with which they 
taught all they knew. To surround himself 
with a staff of young and brilliant pupils, to 
work with them, to show them every process, 
to talk with them of every inspiration, nay, to 
intrust to their hands the execution of detail 
upon the canvas, — this was the method of the 
enthusiasm of the great Italian artists. It was 
thus that Raphael studied with Perugino ; that 
Perugino, Leonardo, and Michel Angelo, at 



tfU WHAT CAREER? 

one time or at another, studied together ; that 
Michel Angelo learned from Ghirlandaio. 
Vasari says of Raphael that he never refused 
to any artist, though he were wholly unknown 
to him, his personal assistance in design or in 
execution of any work ; and in his studio he 
was sometimes surrounded by fifty students, 
some of them the most distinguished men of 
his time, to whom he was glad indeed to teach 
all he knew. 

In every generation of such communion and 
inspiration, by the divine law of selection itself, 
Art gains something. " Nature gives us more 
than all she ever takes away." The mere sug- 
gestion of the man of genius is worked out by 
the care and sympathy of the man of talent ; or 
the ingenious plan and structure of the man of 
talent is taken in hand and made effective by 
the perseverance and adaptations of the man 
of practice. Nay, let us not forget, in such 
a review, the place filled by the mere drudge, 
who thought he could only grind the color, or 
rub down the surface, or hew the wood, or draw 
the water for the more favored children of Art 



WHAT CAREER? 61 

in their divine imagining ; for, as he faithfully 
does the duty that comes next his hand, how 
often has it proved that he also contributed 
what was essential to the whole : nay, how 
often has it been seen that here was the com- 
pleter life, because of the slower development, 
and that when its hour of bud and blossom 
and perfume came, there unfolded from our 
unsightly cactus a wealth of crystalline color, 
spicy fragrance, and delicate grace which ex- 
ceeded all the glories of precocious gardening ! 
Such are the triumphs of Art, where the artist 
proves himself the true artist by taking all who 
come into his confidence, by keeping nothing 
secret which God has taught to him, but teach- 
ing freely to all who will hear all he knows he 
knows. 

Perhaps it is easier for a clergyman to make 
this statement in its principle, because every one 
grants at once that in those cases, rare if you 
please, where our services are of any value, they 
are invaluable and beyond ail price. A sermon 
of Robertson's, if it be of any use at all, is of 
transcendent and infinite value. The advice 



62 WHAT CAREER? 

which the country parson gave your brother 
when he went away to sea, if it had any worth 
at all, had worth not to be measured by any 
human coinage. What, indeed, shall a man 
give in exchange for his soul, if he have a soul ? 
St. Paul, therefore, the first of preachers, puts 
this matter on a perfect basis in the very begin- 
ning, when he says that the man who gives his 
life to the preaching of the gospel, or to other 
ministry, is entitled somewhere and somehow to 
a physical livelihood at the hands of the world 
he serves. As to where or how the somewhere 
or somehow comes, St. Paul is indifferent: let 
the world settle that for itself. So he sends the 
Epistle to the Philippians without entering it 
for copyright at the clerk's office in the library 
of the Senate ; and he sends out the devil from 
the possessed girl, in the streets of Philippi, 
without asking her, as Dr. This or That whom 
you or I could name would do, how much money 
she is willing to pay in advance on the chances 
of a cure. Not because Paul said it, but be- 
cause it is essential common sense, this is the 
necessary law of compensation for those callings 



WHAT CAREER? 63 

-which deal with life, — life being in itself in- 
finite and priceless. Nobody pays us for this 
special duty or that duty. The world is bound 
in general to see that we live. And there is no 
asceticism about this, nor what people call com- 
munism. The world must see that its servants 
so live as to render the most efficient service. 

True, the world's servant must prove to the 
world that he can serve it. The world must 
compensate him at its estimate, and not at his 
own. But, beyond this, the particular method 
in which society or the world arranges for his 
compensation is matter, not of principle, but of 
detail. It will be settled by custom, or settled 
by history, or settled as a natural outgrowth of 
the organization of the country. The life-salary 
of a physician may be adjusted for him by the 
table of fees which the county medical society 
agree upon. I think very likely that may be 
the most convenient way. But he might be 
paid as a ship's surgeon is paid, by an annual 
salary; or he might be paid as they say the 
Chinese physicians are paid, a fixed income pro- 
portioned on the families in health in his dis- 



I 

64 WHAT CAREER? 

trict, subject to a regular deduction, to be paid 
by the doctors in pensions to those families 
where there is disease. Just so in a clerg3Tnan's 
duty : his living may be secured to him by a tax 
upon the land, as in England ; by a salary from 
the government, as in France ; by alms collected 
by begging, as with the Dominicans ; by a stated 
annual compensation guaranteed by a particular 
parish, as is sometimes the practice here ; or by 
the varying contributions of the worshippers, as 
is the custom sometimes. The method is mere 
leather and prunella : the essential is, that the 
servant of the community in a liberal profession, 
because he deals with infinite values, is entitled 
to his living at the hands of the world he serves. 
What follows is, that the world's servant in a 
liberal profession renders his service without 
stint or stop, to the full and utmost of his ca- 
pacity. Ready ? ay, ready ! Body, mind, and 
soul held ready for the noblest duty. Never 
overstrained, never sluggish, never fevered, 
never torpid, never despondent, never extrav- 
agant, — all this because never bought and 
never sold ! 



WHAT CAREER? 65 

The clergy and the doctors deal directly with 
life in distinct issues ; so that these illustrations 
seem most simple, perhaps, in the cases which I 
have cited. Life, being an infinite principle, is 
of infinite value. It is invaluable. But the 
principle is the same in all the liberal callings, 
for the reason that they all deal with infinite 
values, not to be weighed, counted, or measured. 
Such are the dealings of an artist: beauty in 
the finished marble, or on the glowing canvas, is 
of infinite value or it is of none. When we 
read " Viri Romas " at school, we were taught to 
laugh at the barbarous consul who, when the 
statues of Corinth were packed for his Roman 
triumph, told the expressmen of that day that if 
they were broken they must make him new 
ones. But the same absurdity shows itself at 
Washington, whenever Congress limits an ap- 
propriation for a work of art, by saying it shall 
be made from American marble, or by an Ameri- 
can artist, or perhaps by an artist who has never 
learned how, in order to give him an opportu- 
nity. I want my statue first-rate, or I do not 
want any! Give me a fresh egg^ or give me 
none at all! 



66 WHAT CAREER? 

So in education. Let tutor or professor give 
himself completely to his work, — body, soul, 
and spirit, — and I do not care whether he 
teaches my boy botany or electricity. The liv- 
ing soul will quicken other life. But let him 
give only the fag-end, the drainings, what there 
is left in the yellow sheets of the lectures of 
some other generation, again ; he may lecture 
of Sanskrit or of Pleiocene to the boy, it is all 
one, — the one lecture is as useless as the other. 
Let him give his best, or let him give nothing. 

I need no better illustration than the contrast 
between the free sports of your own ball-grounds 
and the prostituted exercise, purchased and 
paid for, of what is miscalled " professional ball- 
playing." The true aspirant in the liberal call- 
ings enters on his career as freshly and as bravely 
as you, young gentlemen, strike the ball, catch 
it, make a base, or wait your turn ; but the other 
has, of his own free will, degraded himself to 
the level of the so-called "professional club- 
man," who must throw so far or must strike so 
true or run so fast, or he has not earned his 
share in the day's receipts, and may lose his 
engagements for the next quarter! 



WHAT CAREER? 67 

I hope the American lawyer understands the 
same truth, that, unless he deals with infinite 
values, his profession is a handicraft and his 
duty a job. Unless he deals with justice, pure 
as heaven, — unless he deals with truth, virgin 
as truth was born, — there is for him no ermine. 
These States, in our organization of society, 
have given distinguished position to the men of 
his calling ; have shielded them by privilege else 
wholly unknown. They are exempt from many 
of the burdens of other life, and see open to 
them its highest honors. This is because they 
are pledged in their very training, and by their 
oaths of office are sworn, to obtain justice for all 
men and for the State. The American lawyer 
ought not to forget the traditions of his pro- 
fession. The Templars of England, through 
whose hands come down to him the methods of 
the past, are the direct descendants of templars 
bound to the service of chivalry. The only fee 
which he receives is in form an " honorarium" 
— not the pay for service. The service is the 
unbought service of the King of truth and of 
right. He goes forth on his circuit, such is the 



68 WHAT CAREER? 

theory of his profession, with the same deter- 
mination to protect the right and to crush the 
wrong which sent out Launcelot or Arthur. 
Who needs his help? Is it this poor boy, ar- 
raigned for murder by a mad mob, because he 
is of another color than theirs, and they will 
wreak on him the wrath of centuries ? Or is it 
some child of luxury, born in the purple, who 
has smiles and honors and gold for her minions ? 
He does his best, be it for the one or for the 
other : ferrets out conspiracy ; seizes truth, 
though truth be hiding her face in tears ; and 
compels the tribunal to decide rightly! The 
moment that the American lawyer abandons 
this position ; the moment that he sells justice, 
or the share of justice that his services can com- 
mand, to the highest bidder ; the moment he 
says that the ring which can spend millions shall 
have millions' worth, while the beggar with 
a penny shall have a penny's worth, — in such 
words of blasphemy he shows he has no knowl- 
edge of what justice is. He abandons the posi- 
tion of one who deals with infinite realities. 
He has left, as one unfit, the ranks of a liberal 



WHAT CAREER? 69 

calling. He makes himself a mere craftsman, 
dealing with things alone, and to be recompensed 
with things alone. Leave him, gentlemen ; leave 
him to the company he deserves ! 

III. The visible distinctions, then, between 
the liberal professions and the crafts, or trades, 
are these two : — 

First, That the liberal professions have, and 
can have, no secrets in their methods. 

Second, That men engaged in them are not 
paid, and cannot be paid, piecemeal for their 
endeavors. 

Woe to the doctor who does not his best for 
the poorest beggar as for the richest prince ! 

Woe to the clergyman who has fewer minis- 
tries of comfort for Lazarus than for Dives ! 

Woe to the lawyer who is other than the 
defender of ignorance against cunning ! 

Woe to the artist who carves less than his 
best in the marble, or paints other than his 
truest on the canvas ! 

Woe to the teacher who teaches by rote and 
catechism, and does not make the classic burn 



70 WHAT CAREER? 

again with Virgil's fire, or the hard equation 
speak with the eloquence of truth divine ! 

And these two distinctions are enough to 
show that the essential principle which lifts the 
liberal professions to their place above all other 
callings, is that they deal directly with infinite 
values. They deal with infinite life, or life 
in one of its infinite relations. The callings of 
the teacher, the artist, the lawyer, the doctor, 
the clergyman, all assert their dignity because 
of this infinite element appearing directly in 
their endeavors. Can any other calling make 
the same claim? That moment there is another 
liberal profession, so long as that claim is true. 

This, gentlemen of the Alpha Delta Phi, is 
the life for which your training in these uni- 
versities is fitting you. In one ministry or an- 
other to which you are to devote yourselves, 
you are to be engaged in these highest of rela- 
tions. Justice, Beauty, Truth, Life : it is to 
these that you consecrate your being, — to a 
chivalry, to a nobility, no less than is involved 
in such consecration. 

That privilege, I said, brings with it its du- 



WHAT CAREER? 71 

ties. Noblesse Oblige! When the Government 
trains your young friends at West Point, they 
know they are bound in honor for its flag to 
live and for its flag to die. Nor have many of 
them proved false to that requisition. When 
these colleges, which you represent, were estab- 
lished by pious men, or by far-seeing Govern- 
ments, or by an aggressive Church, — when they 
gave to you the training and the companionship 
which make you what you are and will be, — 
you were bound in just the same responsibility. 
Noblesse Oblige! You could not, if you would, 
escape the obligation. And the Republic lives 
or dies according as we, and others like us, give 
to her or refuse to her this unpurchased service. 
There are enough who will go into her councils 
bribed by her gold. There are enough who will 
affiliate themselves in intrigues to sway her 
policy, in the hope of petty places for them- 
selves or their friends. 

Unless there are more who are driven into 
the service, which public spirit demands by the 
nobility of men, who would bear their brothers' 
burdens, the Republic dies. Enter upon life, 



72 WHAT CAREER? 

and you will find with every clay some new call 
made for your unselfish service. You are to im- 
prove the schools, or you are to mend the roads, 
or you are to give strength to the church. 
Here must be a free library, and no one but you 
to see to it ; there must be a hospital, and but 
for you the sick will die unattended, and the 
blind in darkness. Do not let us, who are your 
seniors, hear any such excuse from you as that 
" every man has his price ; " that " every hour 
must be coined ; " that " another man may do it 
as well as you." No man can do the work to 
which God calls you, but you yourself. And 
we, as we pass off the stage, expect and demand 
of you, who come after us, that you stand by the 
State and Church which have stood by you. 
Let us hear this resolution from the young men 
who follow us. Our privilege compels us, — 
Noblesse Oblige ! 

Men of my calling, trained to the one univer- 
sal profession in the study of theology, — who 
may study all life, because our study is to draw 
men nearer to the God of life, — in the fascina- 
tion of our own calling never fully understand 



WHAT CAREER? 73 

why men engage themselves willingly in other 
walks of duty. To us all studies are open, and 
there is no science where we may not inquire. 
None the less do we see, however, that all men, 
of whatever calling, so far as they deal with 
these divine and infinite relations of man, — 
truth, beauty, justice, or life, — are all Knights 
of one Round Table, linked together in one 
great fraternity of duty, blessed by one privi- 
lege, and called by one call. That call is, 
to quicken and enlarge the life of the State, — 
the public spirit, in which the State endures. 
We stand by each other, shoulder to shoulder, 
in such endeavors ; or we encourage each other 
by distant signals, each from his lonely beacon. 
That these drudges in the crowded city may 
truly live; that these heathen in the polluted 
islands may truly live ; that this miser, heaping 
up rusty gold, may truly live ; that these de- 
bauched profligates, wasted in lust, may truly 
live ; that the nation, not hampered by her use- 
less acres, nor bound to earth by her mines of 
wealth, may truly live, — this is our office, 
an office which is our privilege. This is the 
4 



74 WHAT CAREER? 

service in which we are united as servants of 
the liberal professions. It is the service to 
which we are called by Him who lived and died 
that men might have life more ab*\ndantly ! 



WHAT CAREER? 75 



IV. 

THE MIND'S MAXIMUM. 

TT^EW men who have to do work with their 
brains, even in the humbler processes of 
such labor, grow to be forty years old without 
regretting that they were not taught, twenty 
years before, those arrangements and devices 
for husbanding their intellectual faculty, and 
making it as useful to them as possible, which 
they have been obliged to learn for themselves, 
without system, and often in the wreck of fail- 
ure. There is nothing so much neglected in 
the universities, where they attempt to teach 
almost every thing, as the sciences of learning 
rapidly and of using readily what one knows. 
The rules and constitutions of Benedictines 
and of Jesuits show how much and how little 
care the lawgivers of such orders of students 
devoted to systematizing study. These direc- 
tions are almost always superficial and empirical, 



76 WHAT CAREER? 

and, though by no means without value, no- 
where rise to the dignity of a philosophical sys- 
tem of intellectual activity. In our own time, 
there has been a great deal said about "self- 
culture," which has professed to give instructions 
for intellectual culture. But a treatise on self- 
culture generally endo, as Dr. Channing's does, 
in showing that it is very important to have the 
mind well trained, and in good working order, 
without telling how it is to be trained for keep- 
ing its working power at a maximum. There 
is also latent in most of such books the grave 
error that a man cultivates his mind simply by 
reading, — a process which, in fact, often in- 
volves a loss of mental efficiency. This error 
has gone so far, that in common talk a man is 
praised for cultivating his mind, simply in pro- 
portion as he reads books of any graver char- 
acter than novels. 

Such errors are not made in either of the 
other great lines of human activity. In the 
domain of bodily work, people understand that 
the training of the body is one thing, and the 
feeding it quite another. When that periodical 



WHAT CAREER? 77 

cycle of interest in physical training comes 
round, through which just now we happen to be 
passing, nobody sends the young gymnast into 
a fruit-market, or to a table d'hOte, directing 
him to eat all he can, by way of educating his 
body. And the time has passed, in the other 
science of training the soul, when men thought 
it would attain its full power by rapt contem- 
plation of God and heaven. It is only in the 
cultivation of the mind, that there is tolerated 
a general gorging : each teacher encouraged to 
force down as much as he can, and the pupil 
then turned loose, to bring his resources to bear 
as best he can, without a suggestion, even, as to 
methods of working power. 

Yet the demand of the present time is es- 
pecially for the utmost amount of intellectual 
work which can be extorted from educated men, 
and consequently for its utmost facility and 
method. There are not enough of them to 
do the world's work now ; and the insufficient 
body of those who are detailed to this duty, 
ought tc husband their mental resources to the 
utmost, and to bring them to bear with the most 



78 WHAT CAREER? 

recondite tactics. Let any professional man of 
to-day amuse himself for an hour with his 
grandfather's diary of his professional life. Let 
him compare the letter a month received and 
answered in the life of the last century, against 
his own file of three or four hundred received, 
indexed, and replied to within a like time. Let 
him compare the grandfather's annual ride, by 
his own horse-and-chaise power, to the " Con- 
vention of Ministers," when Election Week 
came round, with his own annual attendance at 
a year's directors' meetings, committee meetings, 
board meetings, and trustees' meetings. Let 
him look at the schedule of books attached to 
his grandfather's will, called his "library," to 
see that there are not so many in all as he has 
been expected to give an opinion on in the 
conversation of the last five years of life. Let 
him count, in the diary, the number of public 
opinions which his grandfather formed in ten 
years of voting for Washington, Adams, Bow- 
doin and Strong, against the opinions which he 
has himself been compelled to form, and form 
correctly, regarding foreign and home politics, 



WHAT CAREER? 79 

State administration, city, church, and school 
affairs; regarding water, gas, horse railroads, 
school-ventilation, foreign emigration, negro 
emancipation, and the rest, — opinions which 
he has had to enforce, and to carry if he could, 
at three or four special, city, State, and national 
elections every year. Any man who will make 
this contrast will see that this generation re- 
quires an amount of intellectual readiness, and 
a degree of economy in the right and righteous 
use of intellectual power, such as no generation 
has required before. 

We have no hope of laying down the true 
system of the maximum of intellectual effort. 
But we do hope to show that teachers, of what- 
ever grade, ought to give more attention than 
they have done to suggesting for their pupils 
systems so essential. To take a little instance : 
there is not an axiom in physics more absolutely 
settled than the fact that no mental labor of 
any sort should be attempted within the hour 
after a full meal. Yet it is only within a few 
years that the University at our Cambridge 
ceased to bid students recite within forty min- 



80 WHAT CAREER? 

utes after the beginning of breakfast, and with- 
in an hour after the beginning of dinner. What 
was as bad was, that half the college recited — 
or, shall we say, pretended to recite — before 
breakfast was served. The old monks, from 
whom the greater part of our college system 
has descended, at least knew better than this. 
In these details, matters are now better ordered 
at Cambridge. It is possible that the gym- 
nasium and the trainer may introduce yet 
more improvements. We hear rumors some- 
times of practical hints, given by professors 
there, of the way to bring mental faculty into 
play. And we are not without hopes that, as 
there has long been a course there on " The 
Means of Preserving Health," some teacher 
may introduce a course on " The Methods of 
Using Intellectual Power." Such a course 
comes fairly within the range either of theology, 
ethics, metaphysics, or hygiene ; and whoever 
first does throw into system the results of thirty 
years of his own experience, and teach the arts, 
methods, and science of best husbanding and 
cultivating, and of most quickly and vividly 



WHAT CAREER? 81 

using, intellectual power, whether of the 
meanest or finest quality, will earn the grati- 
tude of the meanest and finest minds together, 
and a claim to a share in whatever good they 
may ever work for mankind. 

I. In pointing out the relations of such in- 
struction to the different lines of human science, 
we must, with whatever regret, speak first of its 
physiological relations. We beg the reader, 
however, not, for this, to turn ruthlessly from 
this paper, as if he had here only another divi- 
dend from the assets of Sylvester- Grahamism, 
or House-I-Live-in-ism. We are forced to speak 
of physiology; but our chief object is to say 
that that folly is now nearly exploded, which 
mistook the severe treatment necessary (per- 
haps) for the cure of students in confirmed 
dyspepsia, for the proper treatment of men in 
health, eager to work, mentally, under the 
requisitions of this time, up to the very top of 
their steam. The dyspeptics may settle with 
the doctors what is the proper treatment for 
them. We neither know nor care. Our busi- 

4* 



82 WHAT CAREER? 

ness is with men in health, that they may keep 
their health, and that they may find out what is 
the highest amount of their working power, and 
may keep to that without overrunning it. We 
venture to say that, for them, any system of 
half-diet, of scales to weigh daily bread, of food 
marked by some invalid name, — any system, in 
short, winch in any way suggests hospitals 
or convalescence, — is bad practice. On the 
other hand, we venture to say to the dyspeptics, 
that they had better leave the company of men 
working with their minds till they are well. It 
will not be long. There is always open, for in 
stance, the army ; and when on foot in the open 
air, we forget the doctor soon. 

The dictum with regard to food, then, is 
probably that of one of our most judicious 
medical men, to whom this community is largely 
indebted, who used to say to his class: "In 
brief, gentlemen, you may eat what you choose, 
when you choose, and as often as you choose ; 
only be careful not to look at your tongues after 
you have done." For as, in the highest stage 
which in this world we come to in the religious 



WHAT CAREER? 83 

life, a man forgets he has a soul through ninety- 
nine out of a hundred of the hours which he 
crowds full of enterprise for the glory of God, 
so, in the lower plane of which we speak now, 
he forgets, by a corresponding law, that he has 
a body. The degree to which he remembers or 
forgets it gives an accurate measurement of its 
frailty or its health. 

For all this, however, he has a body ; and 
the ignorance of youth, which risks it some- 
times to its ruin, is not the same grace as the 
confirmed habit of discipline to which we would 
lead youth, which uses it as not abusing it. 
They are, at the least, as different as is inno- 
cence from virtue. Man has a body. It is one 
of his tools. His mind is the other. Now, the 
Latin Grammar is very right in saying: "The 
mind itself knows not what the mind is ;" which 
is as true of Spurzheim's mind as it was of Cic- 
ero's. But the mind does know, by this time, 
that, whatever it is or is not, it works by means 
of a physical arrangement called a brain, or a 
pair of brains. Let the question lie, then, what 
the mind is. Still, in discussing the discipline 



84 WHAT CAREER? 

of its working power, we must say something, 
however unwillingly, on the physiological con- 
ditions of the brain, on the privileges to which 
it is entitled, and the cautions which it has a 
right to claim from those who would effect the 
most the most promptly, with an organ so 
exquisite and so delicate. 

The familiar statement that the " brain is the 
stomach," or the " stomach is the brain," which 
we sometimes hear, would probably not satisfy 
the anatomists. But it expresses very con- 
veniently some results of physiology and anat- 
omy which all workmen ought to remember. 
The chief of them is this, that, at the moment 
when you have given the stomach its work to 
do, you have no right to call upon the brain, at 
the other end of the same system, to be working 
for you also. When you are journeying, you 
take assiduous care that your horse shall not be 
compelled to do any work in the hour after he 
has slowly eaten his grain. The horse has cost 
you money ; and, even in the poor business of 
his muscular action, you know that he needs all 
his vital resource for the single matter of getting 



WIIA1 CAREER ? 85 

his grain in part stowed away. Because you 
happen to be impatient, you do not risk his 
health, which you have paid for. Now, it is 
true that you never bought your brain at a 
horse-market. It might not fetch a bid there. 
Certainly it ought not, if you have no more 
practical notion, after your experience of it, 
than to set it hard at work while the whole 
working power of your system has been pre- 
engaged lower down. Consider what you have 
done. You have poured together a pint of 
coffee, three hot biscuits buttered, the lean 
parts of two mutton-chops, and a slice of stale 
bread, into the reservoir which contains your 
provisions for the first six hours of the day. 
You have done this by way of breaking the fast 
of the night before. Give, now, to the officials 
who have the present charge of those supplies 
an hour's uninterrupted time after you have 
done : do not emba/rass them by constantly 
sending down to ask what is seven times nine, 
or what is the interest for four years and eleven 
days on blank hundred and blankty-blank dol- 
lars at blank per cent. Give them that hour 



86 WHAT CAREER? 

of undisturbed work on their present business, 
and then start the engine slowly ; and thank 
us, who have advised you, for the promptness 
and efficiency of its new revolution. 

"Without dabbling in the detail of physiology, 
we may say, simply, that one precise object for 
which you have eaten your breakfast is to give 
to this delicate organ, the brain, the compensa- 
tion it needs for the work it did for you yester- 
day. You may call it wages, if you regard the 
brain as your servant ; or food, if you regard it 
as your slave ; or sympathy and encouragement, 
if you regard it as your friend. Whatever you 
call the breakfast, the fact is, that the brain lost 
in amount of substance yesterday just in pro- 
portion as you worked hard with it. The nice 
observations of a few years past have shown to 
a certainty that the brain loses elements, which 
may be detected as phosphates in the fluids of 
the body, just in proportion to the intensity of 
its exercise. The masterly argument with which 
you kept that drowsy jury awake yesterday 
cost you its weight in phosphate. The letter of 
entreaty which you wrote last night (which you 



WHAT CAREER? 87 

should have left till this morning) was well 
put, succinct, and pathetic ; and it cost you, 
therefore, its weight in phosphate. Your calcu- 
lation of the comet's orbit differs by two days 
from Dr. Pape's. You have analyzed your 
work, and, in a day's careful labor, have proved 
to all men and angels that you are right and 
that Dr. Pape is wrong. Yes, that is very fine ; 
but the tongs which you put into that white- 
heat lost some little scales of iron as you turned 
over and over the equations and formulas. The 
triumphant calculation cost your brain just its 
weight in phosphate. Do not cheat the servant 
or the friend who has served you so. Or, do 
you count him as a slave, do not cheat your- 
self by starving him. And if you mean to 
work him in that same fashion to-day, let him 
have new phosphates, exquisitely and carefully 
elaborated from the coffee, the chop, and the 
bread-and-butter ; let the new and the old be 
well introduced to each other, and on good 
social terms, before you give the word for new 
duty. 

It is not simply new substance, however, 



88 WHAT CAREER? 

which the brain requires. While we know 
very little about its methods, we know that it 
has methods which it insists upon. We will 
not anticipate the physiologists so far as to say 
it is a Voltaic battery : but this is a guess so 
well sustained now that we might do that with 
reason ; and we may say that, in the particular 
matter with which we are dealing, it works 
with exactly the laws of a Voltaic battery. 
Those laws are now matters understood in daily 
practice. Bear them in mind. If you were 
De Sauty working the Atlantic Telegraph, seek- 
ing the highest power from your battery, and 
the most precise action, would you use the very 
same fluids to stimulate the plates month after 
month, regardless of the wear of the plates 
and the disintegration of the liquid? Not at 
all. You have not only to renew the plates at 
certain periods, but you have, at shorter periods, 
to renew the liquids. Of course you would 
never attempt to work without liquids in the 
battery. As well work without plates. Of 
course you would not be satisfied, even though 
you had the best double-combination improved 



WHAT CAREER? 89 

battery which science ever invented, to work 
by splashing a little liquid, whatever might 
come along, on the plates for a moment. 
Though some result would undoubtedly follow, 
it would not be the high-pressure, extreme- 
tension result which you are in search of. You 
would pour in, with the utmost care, the liquids 
which had been prepared with the most accu- 
rate chemistry. And, even then, you would 
have to wait for some moments, more or less, 
before the battery would fully work on them, 
or they on the battery, and the high action 
begin. Now, whether the brain is or is not a 
battery, let the physiologists settle. It works 
precisely by these laws which we have stated. 
In sleep, for instance, it is inactive, if the fluids 
elaborated from food are not ruthlessly poured 
upon it, in which case it acts in dream or night- 
mare. Before breakfast, it is in no condition 
for active work. When breakfast comes, still 
it must wait till the elaboration of its precise 
liquid is completed. When that is at length 
poured on, grant the few moments, more or 
less, of the electrician, and then you may draw 



90 WHAT CAREER? 

your sparks, lift your heavy weights, telegraph 
to the other side of the world, or the other 
end of time, at your pleasure. 

With these mere hints, we close what we 
have to say of the very foundation of our sub 
ject, however important that foundation may be. 
In most of the popular frenzies on the connec- 
tion of mind and body, some piece of successful 
treatment of disease is seized upon, and held up 
as the legitimate system to be pursued in health. 
Because a shower-bath occasionally gives to 
a disordered system the freshness and vivacity 
which it had forgotten, people tell you to take 
one every day, and that you shall be sure to be 
fresh and alive. The experiment fails. Be- 
cause a bon vivant gains spirits and energy when 
he cuts off half his luxurious dinner, Sylvester 
Graham tells him, virtually, that if he will give 
up the other half he will have twice as much 
spirit and energy. And, in physical exercise, 
because a man works more lightly and happily 
after a walk, or other exercise sufficient to pro- 
mote digestion and renew appetite, we arc told 
to work like Hercules in a gymnasium, and to 



WHAT CAREER? 91 

walk like Captain Walker in the training- 
ground. All this is absurd. If a man wants 
to work with his mind, he only wastes food, 
time, and life by bringing his body up to the 
mark of a blacksmith's or a boxer's. He neither 
needs to run a mile in jive-thirty, nor to lift six 
hundred pounds, nor to walk up to the house- 
top by the lightning-rod. He wants exercise 
enough to keep him in high spirits, good appe- 
tite, and that absolute health which almost for- 
gets there is a body to be cared for. The truth 
is, that a prime condition of vivid intellectual 
labor is that one give as little attention as is 
practicable to the tools with which he works. 
And, just as the mower loses repute for mowing 
who is constantly setting his scythe anew, or 
stopping to sharpen it; and just as he advances 
more slowly than the more skilful workman who 
does not complain of his tools, — the mental 
artisan who works lightly in the harness with 
which it has pleased God to clothe his spirit, ad- 
vances with most success and most rapidity. It 
is folly to pretend there are no tools. It is folly 
to leave them to rust in the meadow over night. 



92 WHAT CAREER? 

It is foil}' to pretend there is no harness. It is 
folly to leave the harness without oiling it. 
But it is worse folly to spend all one's life in 
sharpening one's scythe, or in beautifying the 
traces or the collar. 

We shall leave, for a like reason, without any 
notice, the questions regarding diet: how the 
food should be concocted which is to renew the 
plates of our battery, if it be a battery ; and 
how the liquids, which are to be poured on it to 
excite its motion. Bearing in mind the golden 
injunction which we have quoted, — that we 
may eat much as we please, if we do not make 
food too much the subject of after-meditation ; 
that the brain-stomach is most likely to digest 
our food for us when we do not make the 
stomach-brain weigh it, analyze it, account for 
it, and justify it; resolving that we will not 
thus try to think cake and eat cake too, — we 
do not discuss the relative merits of coffee, tea, 
matte', cocoa, or guarana, in their province of 
reproducing brain, which is, according to Liebig, 
their duty in the economy of civilization. Swe- 
denborg wrote his oracles on coffee ; and so, 



WHAT CAREER? 93 

they say, did Agassiz his. Most poor sermons 
are written on tea, and, they say, some good 
ones. We have read capital editorials which 
were written on shells ; we have heard that the 
high law-officers in England are detected with 
ale when they are caught at luncheon ; and we 
know that Anacreon says that the best is water. 
Into that discussion we do not go. 

II. We have reached a much more interest- 
ing part of our subject, where, however, all 
the authorities in print begin to fail us sadly. 
We may call it the internal economy of mental 
action. It seeks light on the best methods 
and proportions of work, either in varying men- 
tal processes, or in holding steadily to one. 
It involves, also, the questions as to the real 
maxima of intellectual effectiveness. On these 
subjects the monkish authorities have but little 
to say. The truth is that their work did not 
admit of much variety. It was simply the 
steady plodding on of uncritical readers, or of 
self-satisfied writers, who were in no dread of 
criticism. The German scholars also have wide 



94 WHAT CAREER ? 

reputation as great workmen, but we are dis- 
posed to challenge that too. When it is said 
that Heyne worked twenty hours three days in 
the week, and twenty-four hours on the inter- 
mediate days, — and this is said of Heyne, — a 
quality of work is meant much of which does 
not deserve the name. These pundits go into 
their rooms, and call all that is done there 
work, if it only involve reading. The news- 
paper counts for work, or the last novel or re- 
view. We have known similar self-deception 
nearer home, but we have nothing to do with it 
in this paper. We are discussing simply the 
action of the mind which directly aims at some 
new evolution of truth, or some new presenta- 
tion of truth evolved before. The student is at 
work if he is presenting truth in new forms to 
himself, or if he is attempting to present it in 
new forms to others. But, exactly as copying 
does not come within our idea of intellectual 
work, because the workman there only repeats 
for others truth already evolved, in an unchanged 
form, mere reading or acquisition of information 
undigested comes as little within it. For here 



WHAT CAREER? 95 

the workman only repeats to himself the result 
of the study of others. The workman, in both 
cases, works mechanically. In fact, mere read- 
ing is the greatest of intellectual luxuries. If 
there is any difficulty in understanding an au- 
thor, of course an element of labor comes in, 
as when one reads in a language not perfectly 
familiar to him. But where the reading is per- 
fectly intelligible, it is not to be ranked as intel- 
lectual work. It will undoubtedly fatigue eye 
and brain ; but the fatigue to the brain is the 
very minimum involved in any mental action. 
As the German epicure said he could eat larks 
all day, any man or woman may say he can 
read all the time he can spare from his mebl&s 
his digestion, and his other physical exercu>e&, 
If it tire his eyes, that is merely a bodily affaii 
We do not therefore take mere reading intc 
the account of the mental effort which we ar< 
considering. 

A popular writer l succinctly stated the moral 
aspect of the maximum of work in the following 
words, in a newspaper article: "No man has 

1 Mr. Thomas Drew. 

tore. 



96 WHAT CAREER? 

a right to incur more fatigue in a day than the 
sleep of the next night will recover from." 

As a general rule, we conceive that this state- 
ment is the true one. There are exceptions, 01 
course, when generals must march their men by- 
forced marches, but they are exceptions to be 
permitted with the greatest care. The inten- 
tional violation of the rule is simply suicide 
by inches. The man who wakes to-day con- 
scious that he overworked yesterday, because he 
finds he is not up to yesterday morning's work- 
ing mark, has run back just so far in his own 
life. There seems no moral distinction between 
the act, if it were intentional, and the act 
by which, instead of injuring his brains a little, 
he should injure them a great deal in blowing 
them away. The regular recurrence of night 
and day seems to be so adapted to the human 
constitution of mind and body, that we must 
put ourselves under regulations of this sort 
dependent upon it. And as no man eats one 
great breakfast Sunday, expecting to lunch 
Tuesday for the week, to take the week's exer- 
cise Wednesday, to dine once for all Thursday, 



WHAT CAREER? 97 

to take a twenty-four hour siesta on Friday, and 
a protracted cup of tea Saturday, all to be fol- 
lowed by a week's night of sleep ; as every 
man admits that the regimen of the body is to 
be regulated by cycles of twenty-four hours 
each, — we hold that every man must use his 
mind in the same way. It must come up to 
time, as the Ring says, every morning fresh and 
bright, as if, indeed, it were new-born, if we 
mean to get from it the maximum of vivacity 
and power. The great tours de force invariably 
prove this. A newspaper reporter will tell you 
of specific feats in which he wrote steadily, in 
the most fatiguing form of writing, perhaps for 
fourteen consecutive hours. So will turfmen 
tell you of horses who have been driven with- 
out stopping for as many. But neither of them 
will tell you that the week in which those hours 
were included came up to the average steady 
work of the mind, or the horse, concerned. 

No more work is to be done in a day than the 
night's sleep will recover from. That is the 
first rule. So far the sun, Ammon Re, is the lord 
of this business, as the Egyptians regarded him. 

6 



98 WHAT CAREER ? 

So much of subdivision is mapped out foi 
a man in the calendar as matter of morals. 
And, as the calendar marks Sunday with red 
letters for him, he is to throw that also out from 
his list of working-days, except as the priests 
in the temple profaned the Sabbath and were 
blameless. If a man's profession make him work 
on Sundays, — as does a daily editor's, or his 
printer's, or a chorister's, or organist's, or other 
minister's, — let him make allowance for that va- 
riation by taking his rest-day on some other day 
of the week: best on Saturday, so far as the 
arrangements of modern life suggest the resting- 
day for the exceptional classes we have named. 
There is no difficulty in advancing thus far in 
the regulation of working-time. But in further 
subdivision, where we have the moral question 
the ground is more difficult, the lights less fre- 
quent, and the authorities are more at variance. 
Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, an excellent guide, 
tells us in his Discourse before the Divinity 
School Alumni, that every man who works with 
his mind "should have a vocation and an avo- 
cation." That is to say, to avoid the fatigue 



WHAT CAREER? \)\) 

of monotony, or the danger of any of the forms 
of monomania, from despondency up to the 
acme of that disease, let a man be sure that 
his daily duty has, at least, two sides to it. 
When he has worked enough at the one, let 
him work in turn at the other. Be it observed, 
this is a rule for alternating forms of work. 
We say nothing as yet of play. The rule, as 
an empirical rule, proves itself true. It would 
prove itself true in practice, even in the limited 
view which our subject takes, — a much nar- 
rower one than the broad view of professional 
life which Dr. Peabody was considering. For 
if we only regarded mental efficiency and vi- 
vacity, it would prove better for a man to have 
two subjects of mental effort, which should en- 
gage him alternately, than one alone. As mat- 
ter of practice, most thinkers, or most students, 
would admit this. But what is the principle 
on which this rule rests, — and how far may we 
make the rule go? First, as to the principle. 
Are there different sets of mental faculties, as 
the phrenologists say, so bounded and contrasted 
that it rests one set to have you put another set 



100 WHAT CAREER? 

in motion, — as they used to tell us that a 
blacksmith, after striking with his arms all 
day, rested himself with dancing? When, for 
instance, one has been loving his children in- 
tensely for an hour, does it rest him to do sums 
in the rule of three for an hour, and then will 
he rest himself more by remembering the roots 
of the Greek numerals for an hour more ? We 
do not believe he will. We believe this whole 
theory of the rotation of mental crops to be a 
mistake. The true rotation is precisely akin to 
that of the rotation of vegetable crops. The 
old notion was, that the land which had been 
cultivated for wheat rested when you put it in 
clover, and rested more when you put it in 
turnips ; so that it was with perfect enthusiasm 
that in the fourth year it received wheat again, 
and that it then produced wheat as never be- 
fore. The truth was, that that land never 
rested at all. The clover took up elements 
which the wheat had left, and the turnips found 
such as both had left. But if the clover and 
the turnips had been carried off the ground, 
when the wheat came again in the fourth year 



WHAT CAREER? 101 

of the rotation to the dinner which had been 
warmed over twice for these different guests, 
it found but poor picking left. And it proves 
that the system of rotation, undoubtedly well 
founded, requires for its correct use that one or 
more years shall be virtually years of rest. The 
best rest is that which is given when a crop is 
planted, permitted to grow, and ploughed back 
into the ground. At all events, nothing must 
be carried, in the rest-year, from the field. We 
believe this to be just as true of intellectual 
croppings. You undoubtedly gain by varying 
your vocation with an avocation ; perhaps you 
gain then by what we have heard called a 
"third," — some third pursuit, which may be 
called an avocation of the second power. But 
you have only a very limited line of relief in 
this direction. It is undoubtedly exhausted 
when you have come to the " third," — and 
very soon you must give to the soil you are 
drawing from the complete rest of a fallow, 
or of hours spent for its own re-creation only. 
It is probable that the impression that passive 
qualities are rested because others are at work, 



102 WHAT CAREER? 

is false. The blacksmith does not rest himself 
by dancing, or reading, or playing checkers. 
He may di-vert himself thus, but he does not 
re-create himself. To re-create himself he is 
more apt to eat his dinner, to drink his tea, to 
smoke his pipe, or to go to sleep. In all which 
experiments but one, he shows his practical 
knowledge of physiology. 

It is true that the facility with which different 
minds change from subject to subject, is one of 
the traits of character in which men are most 
unlike each other. We are the more restricted 
in our discussion of it. The word " versatility " 
has been invented to express a high degree of 
this facility. It is to be observed, however, 
that because Lord Brougham can discuss Nat- 
ural Theology, Criminal Law, and any thing 
else in the Cyclopsedia, with equal ease, when 
he chooses, it does not follow that he will choose 
to work on three such subjects in the same hour 
or in the same day. Our own conviction is 
that he will prefer to do all his work on one 
in one day, and all his work on another in an- 
other day, perhaps in another month or year* 



WHAT CAREER? 103 

All reputations for versatility are to be studied 
with reference to this distinction. The ease 
with which Mr. Charles Mathews or Mr. Pro- 
teus Love drops behind a table, and reappears 
instantly as an old woman instead of a young 
man, as we saw him just before, is indeed amus- 
ing to the spectator. But it is not a valuable 
accomplishment. Even as a bit of costume, the 
old woman's dress or the young man's would 
prove badly adapted for practical purposes. In 
the same manner, the versatility which works 
its wonders in mental work within an hour is 
a gift as amusing, and in some points perhaps 
proves convenient ; yet the work it does is of 
but poor quality after the first change or two. 
Homer characterizes this quality, when he says 
of Margites, — 

Tl6\\' rjirlffraro epya, kclkcos 8' rjiricrraro irdura. 
"He knew a great many things, — but he knew all of them 
badly." 

The versatility, however, of which Mr. James 
Martineau's various scholarly work seems so 
good an illustration, — of a mind which occu- 
pies itself heartily with one subject till it can 



104 WHAT CAREER? 

make to the world some statement of real value 
regarding it, and then grapples with like force 
with a subject wholly different, is a versatility 
without which the world would lose almost the 
blessings which it wins from its heroes. 

Work without interruption, then, while you 
work, till the day's task is done. That is the 
rule for gaining the maximum of the best work 
of which the particular mind concerned is cap- 
able. Between the vocation and the avocation 
there is fair opportunity for a pause, which may 
be hours long if necessary. But when work is 
once begun on one subject, it should not be 
suspended till the day's contribution has been 
rendered. In " Miss Martineau's Travels " is 
Dr. Channing's statement on this point, — not 
repeated, if we remember, in his Life. He says 
that the first hour of composition is to him very 
painful, — that the work grows easier and easier 
as the hour advances, but that only at the be- 
ginning of the second hour does he begin to 
work at ease and cheerfully. The experience 
again reminds us of what we see in a Voltaic 
battery, of the irregular, almost spasmodic la- 



WHAT CAREER? 105 

bor of the cells when work begins, and the 
gradual regularity, and even passion, which in 
a short time the process obtains. Now the 
practical remark of importance is that, if the 
work be thoroughly interrupted, all this initial 
difficulty has to be passed through again. It is 
exactly as if the battery be lifted from the liquid 
long enough for its plates to dry. The bore 
who says, " I will not interrupt you, I only 
want two minutes," speaks like a fool. The 
two minutes involve as completely a new initia- 
tion of the mental process as two months would 
do. He might as well say, " I am not going to 
break your mirror into pieces far apart, — I 
will only separate the bits by a crack of a 
millionth of an inch." You do not want the 
mirror broken at all. And you must not have 
the mental process broken at all, whether of 
mathematics, of logic, of historical research, 
of the reconstruction of lost historical truth, of 
illustration by poetry, or of composition for 
conviction, if it is to be your best process. It 
must begin and work steadily to its own self- 
appointed close. There is not the slightest un- 
6* 



106 WHAT CAREER? 

certainty when that close comes. You know it 
yourself when you feel it. And then, after such 
pause as you like, the a-vocation must begin. 

It is said that the musical critics can tell in 
Mozart's Requiem at what points he went to 
sleep in its composition, and was waked by his 
wife to begin again. We have no doubt this 
is true. A truly sympathetic criticism would 
show of almost any fine literary composition 
where the work was suspended and where it 
began again, — where Homer nodded. If in 
any case this seems impossible, it is probably 
because the work is all mosaic: the mental 
process was broken so often, that it is patched 
all through, and nowhere rises to the severity 
or the simplicity of an intaglio in an unbroken 
gem. 

This principle of intellectual effort seems to 
us to decide the question as to the number of 
a-vocations, or sides to a man's daily duty. 
Two sides will probably exhaust his working- 
power for a day. The " third " to which we 
have alluded should, in our opinion, be thrown 
wholly into the part of the day allotted to 



WHAT CAREER? 107 

amusement, and should be of no character re- 
quiring energy, will, or vivacity even. It ought 
not even to involve physical fatigue beyond the 
requirements for the day's bodily exercise. Do 
not play chess for a diversion to intellectual 
labor. Do not read history merely because you 
like to. Do not read any thing grave enough 
to require what Capel Lofft calls re-flection, — 
the turning back over the passage to determine 
whether you agree with the author or no. Do 
not persuade yourself that a fatiguing walk will 
rest your brain. It is only so much drain on 
phosphates of the muscles, and you must repro- 
duce phosphate for the brain before you can go 
to work again. Do not pretend to be virtuous, 
in short, by passing any labor into currency as 
if it were play. You had better go to the 
theatre, or to the opera, if these are not as hard 
work to you as they seem to be to most per- 
formers. Play cards. Dance. Listen to music. 
Laugh. Sit on a rail-fence and see how green 
the grass is, and how blue the sky. New Eng- 
land undertook, a generation ago, to smuggle 
the Lyceum into the place of the drama, and 



108 WHAT CAREER? 

grind a few axes in the way of instruction when 
she pretended to be amusing her work-people. 
Human nature took its revenge, however. And 
it has been years since a Lyceum Lecture of the 
popular class instructed anybody, called for any 
thought, or indeed fatigued any one but the 
lecturer. All which is as it should be. 

We have said that the time to stop work 
showed itself. As soon as the vital current 
enlivening study or composition flags, this time 
has come. If the student looks at his watch, or 
shakes his hour-glass, or in any way feels mis- 
trust of his subject or himself, the battery is 
losing power, and the direction of its activity 
should be changed. This is the time for the 
a-vocation to come in. "We need not say that 
the more unlike its processes to those of the 
vocation, the better for all concerned. If one 
have involved writing, let the other be mainly 
reading. If the one have been fine art, let the 
other be mathematical, or historical, or, in a 
word, as different as it can be. In our judg- 
ment, by the time the a-vocation rings its alarm- 
bells in its turn, and asks, as the Jacquard loom 



WHAT CAREER? 109 

does in like junctures, for a change of color, it 
is time for the workman to stop mental work 
for that day. Let his exercise begin, or his 
diversion, his social life, or that general pot- 
pourri of undetermined existence in which most 
of us spend most of our hours ; directed not by 
ourselves but by destiny, — by the post-office, 
the almanac, the pig escaped, the cows in the 
cornfield, the agreeable Englishman who has 
come with a letter of introduction, or the unfor- 
tunate missionary to the Ojibways who wants 
to know how he is to educate three promising 
young men. The day's mental work is done, 
when the first mental a-vocation after the voca- 
tion begins to drag. 

It is perfectly idle to attempt to say how long 
the day's mental work will continue before this 
limit is attained. It will vary with different 
minds, of course, and it will vary in the same 
mind, with the class of work done, and the 
degree of concentration required. The tours de 
force of which the human mind is capable are 
so extravagant that they can hardly be over- 
stated. A hard-working physician in an epi- 



110 WHAT CAREER? 

demic will keep on his beat twelve hours, 
working down two or three horses in that time 
in his duties in a large city. But he is committing 
suicide all the time, and in this case scarcely by 
inches. The gentlemen of the bar sit in their 
offices, or in court, nearly as long, for continued 
periods. But much of each day is not work in 
that duty. Our own observation of as broad 
range of lives as have left us their memoranda, 
would decide that three hours is as high a max- 
imum as an average mind can seek, for the 
average of its concentrated daily effort, of six 
days' work in a week, and fifty-two weeks in a 
year. This is Sir Edward Lytton's statement ; 
Scott's was even lower than this. The British 
Commission on Education has often reported, 
what we have no doubt is true, that with chil- 
dren, at the end of three hours' faithful study, 
the power of acquiring is, in general, at the end 
for that day. That is to say, the child could 
learn in three hours, well used, all that it does 
learn in the six you keep it in school. We have 
no doubt this is true for children. We should 
put the acquiring power of men and women 



WHAT CAREER? Ill 

rather higher, perhaps ; but the average of all 
kinds of highly concentrated mental work is 
probably fully stated as three hours a day. 

But alas ! in saying that the man who works 
with his brains ought, for the best work which 
he can do, to work on only two lines of work 
every day, we do but demand an impossibility, 
if we be speaking of modern civilization. Per- 
haps they work so in Arcadia, though Dr. 
Wordsworth makes no mention of any clergy- 
men, lawyers, or critics whom he found there. 
We have heard it said that in Charleston, South 
Carolina, before that city and State were in- 
cluded in the organism of the world, no man 
did but one thing in a day. At dinner you 
conversed on the day's employment. " I," said 
one, " went to Russell's for my umbrella, which 
I left there yesterday." " I," said another, 
" called at the news-room." " I," said a third, 
" made my compliments to Mr. Frazer, and 
saw his last picture." And the man who had 
done one thing in a forenoon deserved well 
of his country and posterity. Now that South 
Carolina also manures her fields, pays her 



112 WHAT CAREER? 

laborers, shoots her voters, and approaches 
modern civilization in other points of prac- 
tice, good and bad, there is left no such sim- 
plicity of civilization anywhere. The man who 
has brains, who should start on the determi- 
nation that he would every day devote him- 
self to two subjects only, would soon be shut 
up by his neighbors in the same palace with 
those who have none. Men must devote 
thought, and a great deal of thought, to a very 
wide circle of inquiries and occupations as a 
single day's work goes by. One cannot be 
Saint Bernard, or Duns Scotus, if he would, in 
a world which has advanced into the nineteenth 
century of the enlivenment of its life. To 
speak only of the invention of the post-office, 
— of which the advantages have never been so 
demonstrated as to leave it beyond question 
whether the curse it inflicts is not greater, — 
correspondence alone is enough to destroy the 
ideal system of daily mental activity which we 
have tried to describe. 

" Correspondence is the burden of modern 
civilization," says Saint-Marc Girardin. He is 



WHAT CAREER? 113 

describing the life of luxury which the first 
families of Home led in their sea-shore homes in 
the centuries which Gibbon calls the happiest 
in the history of the world. On the other hand, 
most men of affairs tell us to-day that it is per- 
sonal presence only which moves men new, 
letters going so easily where printed circulars 
go of course, into the waste-basket, or more 
directly into the fire. Yet the world has not 
yet learned this truth ; if it be truth, and cor- 
respondence is still one of our greatest burdens. 
It is a burden which precisely illustrates the 
danger which we have described, of cutting off 
one mental process to begin again on another ; 
of leaving to dry the supposed plates of the 
mental battery, before we set them to work 
again. It is far more fatiguing to the mind to 
write ten letters on different subjects of impor- 
tance, than to write one on the same subject of 
the same length as all the ten. The change 
involved of method, of style, of familiarity, of 
recollections, calls so severely on the mental 
power employed as to drain it to the utmost. 
It would therefore be better, unquestionably, 



114 WHAT CAREER? 

always to answer a letter as soon as it is re- 
ceived, while the mind is still occupied with the 
subject, thus avoiding break and jar. Letter 
and answer would then cost only the fatigue 
of hand required in writing. But this would 
shock people's prejudices in favor of second 
thoughts, there being in the world a suspicion 
that rowen is sometimes worth more than June 
hay. And it would make correspondence fa- 
tally brisk. The railroads are bad enough, but 
how terrible life, if every letter brought its 
echo by return mail ! The practical way for us 
to regain the paradise of our ancestors in these 
matters would seem to be to answer our letters 
in the moment which received them, and then 
lay the answers by for a month before we 
posted them. One hard-pressed friend suggests 
to us that the invention of small note-paper is 
the providential remedy. We have never seen 
any small enough to cure the disease. Another 
studies the Duke of Wellington's despatches, 
in hope of attaining brevity. Another has 
blanks by which a secretary furnishes uniform 
answers to all the people who would like his 



WHAT CAREER? 115 

recommendation for Chief-Justice, or, if they 
cannot be that, would be glad of a subordinate 
commission in the quartermaster's department. 
But the system of blanks goes only a very 
little way in relief. Another used a manifold 
letter- writer for his letters of affection, and sent 
them in triplicate to different friends. But this 
plan was upset when he had one returned by a 
wounded spirit not appreciated. Members of 
Congress sometimes detail their wives to write 
their autographs for them. Mr. Fillmore used 
the best plan we know, if the thing is to be 
done at all, in dictating to a phonographic re- 
porter his letters. They were then written out 
at the reporter's leisure, signed, and posted; 
yet the original copies of the letters were pre- 
served in the phonographic notes. Sixty let- 
ters of average length could perhaps thus be 
dictated in an hour ; but we should say that 
an hour of such work would be all the concen- 
trated work any man ought to do in a day. 
The most effective man we ever knew never 
answered any letters at all. All that he wrote 
were the letters which affairs made necessary 



116 WHAT CAREER t 

for the communication of information to his 
fellow-laborers. For the rest, let them come 
and see him, — as, alas ! they did. It will prob- 
ably be in this way eventually that the " burden 
of modern civilization" will be tipped off its 
back into the sea. 

We need not apologize for this excursus on 
letter-writing, for the illustration it furnishes of 
the difficult conditions imposed on mental effort 
by modern barbarism is an illustration which 
covers very wide ground. Correspondence is 
the most oppressive of a series of demands made 
on men of affairs which interrupt the regularity 
of mental effort for which any system provides. 
And no study of the subject is in the least ade- 
quate, which does not allude to such external 
demands and interruptions. They must be pro- 
vided for as well as the mind's personal and im- 
mediate requisitions. If they cannot be resisted 
or avoided, the reply made to the requisitions 
of the mind itself must be adapted, as far as 
possible, to their rapacity. We are not bound 
to travel into detail to discuss the adaptations 
which will be found the most successful. Every 



WHAT CAREER? 117 

department of mental effort has to furnish its 
own ; the tricks by which different hunted hares 
escape from the hounds let loose upon them in 
the barbarism in which we live, — the methods 
by which men doing their own duty meet, in 
contest or in submission, the invaders who ask 
them also to do theirs. Nor is it fair to speak 
as if all such invasions of a man's own plan of 
life ought to be avoided or evaded. In a world 
where our whole duty is to bear each other's 
burdens, it ill becomes any man of us to choose 
the particular way in which he will bear them, 
— the particular yoke which he will carry. 

It is evident that, if one is to shift from point 
to point among a multitude of important cares 
in such complex affairs, the maximum of work- 
ing time must be reduced, even below the poor 
three hours which we have given as the average 
of daily exertion. Baron Rothschild, who may 
be supposed to have arranged as nicely as any 
man can the methods for disposing rapidly of 
demands made on his thought, is said to meet 
them thus. He stands in a central office, in his 
place of affairs, where he can speak, if necessary 



118 WHAT CAREER? 

to his heads of department. Those who have 
personal business with him are bidden to pre- 
pare in writing what they would say ; they are 
introduced, and give to him or read to him the 
memorandum. He answers ; and the conversa- 
tion, if any is necessary, follows, both standing. 
Brevity is attempted by the two expedients of a 
standing position and of written inquiry. How 
necessary this is, any clergyman will say who 
has known a visitor take three hours in saying 
he wants to be married. On the other hand, 
the value of personal presence is not lost, and 
the assistants, if necessary, are within call. 
Thus a hundred visitors, perhaps, are disposed 
of in a forenoon. Concentration could hardly 
go farther. We have described these details 
to say that it would evidently be impossible to 
work in that way, even up to our poor little 
average of three hours daily. The more varied 
the subjects of work so highly concentrated, the 
shorter must its period necessarily be. 

Of the palliatives possible for the relief of 
the pressure of such work as falls on the student 
or other literary workman, we do not speak in 



WHAT CAREER? 119 

detail, because every condition of mental ac- 
tivity must of necessity provide its own. The 
transferring of the mechanical operation of 
writing, by those who have much work of com- 
position, to the hand of an amanuensis, is the 
only one of these expedients which we are to 
speak of here. It does not seem well to use 
this relief to the full, as did an alderman of one 
of our chief cities, who, confident that he could 
always hire a reader to read for him, and a clerk 
to write for him, neglected to acquire for him- 
self the two accomplishments of writing and 
reading. There are purposes of both accom- 
plishments which cannot be attained by proxies. 
So this officer found, when, in an attempt to 
escape from the arrest which threatened him, 
because his various writings were so inconsistent 
with each other, he arrived at the fork of two 
roads, looked sadly at the finger-post, whose 
guidance was useless to him because he was 
without his reader ; and so returned to meet the 
sheriff, and to acknowledge that there were 
occasions when one must do his own reading, as 
he had found before, by the state of his bank- 



120 WHAT CAREER? 

books, that he had better have clone some of his 
own writing. Sentimental or exacting corre- 
spondents, too, are apt to expect that a letter 
shall be in the handwriting of the author. To 
meet this difficulty, the English offices ha^ve 
clerks in readiness, who, in three days after a 
change of ministry, are able to write in the 
handwriting of the new officials, and to execute 
for them their " private and confidential memo- 
randa." Without going into such niceties, it 
may be said that any duty so mechanical as the 
mere forming of letters into words is probably 
better done by a young person whose whole 
attention is turned to it, than it can be by the 
person who is also engaged in determining what 
the words shall be. We have no doubt, there- 
fore, that, on the whole, the employment of an 
amanuensis improves the quality of the work 
performed. It is Yevj true that, when the ex- 
periment of dictating is first tried, the luxury 
of the ease it gives is apt to be so great that it 
tends to looseness and verbosity of style ; for 
there is no better check on sesquipedalianism 
than the necessity of writing down one's sesqui- 



WHAT CAREER? 121 

pedalian words for one's self. And, in the 
beginning, if one is lying on a sofa, and using 
another's hand, he puts in his long words and 
long phrases and unnecessary sentences, in the 
mere luxury of freedom, as the schoolboy ca- 
vorts and plunges as he first rushes out into 
the open air. But this is but the incident of 
a beginning ; and, with a little discipline and 
criticism, any man can learn to write with the 
pen of an amanuensis in the same style as with 
his own. Some of Scott's best novels were 
written by the hand of others ; some by his 
own. We would challenge the most exquisite 
criticism to discern between the two classes 
from the mere internal evidence afforded by 
their composition. 

We can perfectly well hear the whine or the 
snort of indignation with which conscious genius 
has put by our suggestions in this paper, long 
before reading to this point, where we close. 
Conscious genius is very apt to say that it must 
work without rules. It has a good deal to tell 
about the tides or inspiration ; and it is prone to 
6 



122 WHAT CAREER? 

suppose that those tides are very irregular. It 
will ridicule the possibility of any science of 
mental effort; it will say that man must wait 
till he is inspired ; and that until he is inspired 
all effort is vain. It says a great deal more on 
this subject, but in this dictum is the pith of 
the whole. Now, we are willing to own that 
we know nothing of the methods of genius ex- 
cept as we read of them in the lives of men 
of genius. But from those authorities we have 
to remark that if Goethe and Schiller, Walter 
Scott, even Byrou and Bulwer, are men of 
genius, — not to go outside our own generation, 
— genius is as glad to work under absolute, 
fixed, and methodical conditions as is any hod- 
carrier. Even Byron, we say ; for when B} T ron 
was engaged upon a poem, he knew perfectly 
well that it would not finish itself, but that 
his persistent will must finish it. The ex- 
traordinary amount of work he did finish in 
his short career is a monument to the per- 
sistency and steadiness of his working power. 
And we doubt if there be any touchstone more 
certain to distinguish between real genius and 



WHAT CAREER? 123 

Brummagem, than is the test which determines 
whether the mind in question is fresh, vivid, 
and in true condition for effort on every blessed 
morning given it by God; or whether it can 
only boast certain fungous growths of gaudy 
color, but of most perishable substance, — which 
spring up on some mornings, and are nowhere 
to be found on others, — lawless and irregular, 
and therefore, if not quite worthless, quite un- 
trustworthy. 

The truth is that all mental effort, like all 
bodily effort, must fulfil the conditions of effort 
which God has imposed. This is as true of the 
highest efforts of divine poetry, as it is of the 
daily -bread work of the mere artisan of letters, 
who makes no pretence to genius or inspiration. 
We have been speaking, thus far, only of the 
two tools which are employed — the body and 
the mind — in such endeavor. But for the soul 
which employs them, if they are to be kept at 
their full power, there must be constant acces- 
sions of the Life from which the soul is boin. 
It is Life which bends the fingers to the pen ; 
it is Life which drives the pen along the page ; it 



124 WHAT CAREER? 

is Life which makes the page live and teach its 
lesson. This Life of the soul must be renewed 
and increased with every day of the soul's ef- 
fort, or the page at length ceases to glow, just 
as the fingers fail to grasp the pen. The soul 
must be, indeed, new-born to its daily work as 
each day comes round. The soul must each 
day reassert its mastery over body and mind, 
without which they are only two rebel slaves 
setting in uproar the whole of the soul's king 
dom. We have said enough, perhaps, to show 
that, for full mental power, this empire of the 
soul must be a stern one. The soul must deny 
the body in its appetites of meat, of drink, even 
of sleep, and of play. It must cut off the stim- 
ulants which the body would like. It must in- 
sist on the repose without which the body dies. 
We have seen also the restraints and the com- 
mands which it imposes on the mind. The mind 
would gladly run in a thousand directions in 
the morning's effort ; and the soul grimly holds 
it to one duty, or, at the most, to two. We 
see, again, that the soul does not let off either 
servant to a holiday because they choose to beg 



WHAT CAKEER? 125 

for it. When the hour of work comes, they 
work ; when it is at end, they stop. Whether 
they like to work, or like to stop, the soul 
makes the decision. For such absolute empire, 
the soul needs new tides of Life daily. And 
God has been pleased to grant such tides, re- 
curring with the regularity of his own sunlight 
if the soul accedes to the conditions. If the 
soul uses to his glory the Life of to-day, under 
the conditions which he has fixed for its various 
exertions, he gives new Life for the duties of 
to-morrow. The faithful, patient soul working 
with him for his infinite designs finds itself new- 
born as each morning struggles up the sky, 
and, with the freshness of new birth, enters on 
the new day's duties, — "as a little child " 
indeed. But unless the soul accept the condi- 
tions, and unless it work in the Father's work, 
it has no such renewal, and it has no continued 
victory; any Hercules with whom it wrestles 
can lift it from the ground, and, with all its 
struggling, it can get no new strength for 
conflict. Vital power for the objects of life ; 
vital power sufficient to hold in constant check 



126 WHAT CAREER? 

the vagaries of the mind and the appetites of 
the body ; vital power, again, sufficient to reani- 
mate every morning a mind which has new 
duties to undertake, and a body which is to 
fulfil meekly an imperial will, — is gained only 
at the fountain of Life. He has most of that 
power who drinks deepest at the fountain. He 
who never drinks — the Machiavel or the Na- 
poleon — finds, before he is done, that body 
and mind cannot be driven up to the behests of 
the will. He who works with God hast God's 
breath to renew him every day. He whc vrorks 
without God finds his body give way just vfhen 
he needs it, or his mind disobedient wk*n a 
crisis comes. For his vital power is diminished 
by his every victory ; while the faithful c uild 
of God receives the promise, and with e^ery 
day has " Life more abundantly." 



WHAT CAREER? 127 



V. 

A THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. 

QOME school of theology is allied to almost 
every one of our larger colleges, in more 
or less close relations. Most of the colleges, 
indeed, were established by one or another ec- 
clesiastical body. In the lists published in the 
almanacs and elsewhere, they will be found 
marked with the letters B., R. C, E., P., and 
the rest, to indicate that they are under Baptist, 
Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, or 
other control. In many of the older colleges, 
the original plan was the training of young men 
for the Christian ministry. In the more recent 
instances of colleges thus fostered, the wish is 
rather to protect boys from the proselyting of 
other sects ; to give them a direction towards 
the ministry, and such an inclination for it as 
may be followed up in the theological seminary 
or college distinctively so-called. The academ- 



128 WHAT CAREER? 

ical college is no longer made a place for the 
formal study of theology. Every denomination 
of Christians has its own institutions for that 
special purpose. Special societies for education 
are formed, to supply them with students. The 
Presbyterian Church in each of its organiza- 
tions, North, South, and " United," maintains 
such societies for assisting in the education 
of young men in these schools. The largest of 
these, that of the Presbyterian Church North, 
expends nearly a quarter million annually in 
this service. The American Education Society, 
in similar service, expended twenty-eight thou- 
sand dollars last year ; and the similar society 
of the Reformed Dutch Church, thirteen thou- 
sand dollars. The various beneficiary funds 
which the Unitarians apply to like service, afford 
about ten thousand dollars a year for this pur- 
pose. Under such auspices, there are now in 
this country just one hundred theological schools, 
existing either as independent institutions or as 
the theological departments of universities. 

What is the reason why young men do not go 
to these institutions in much larger numbers ? 



WHAT CAREER? 129 

The reason, I suppose, is two-fold. First, an 
objection lies against the method supposed to be 
pursued in the theological school. Second, an 
objection lies against the profession to be pur- 
sued as the result of this method. 

I am certain that both these objections rest on 
insufficient grounds; and I propose to discuss 
them both, giving most space to the first. The 
objection is taken on a limited view of theologi- 
cal schools as they were : it is certainly not to 
be sustained by any adequate view of the better 
theological schools of America, or the schools of 
Germany, as they are. 

If we could look in on the free conversation 
of some literary club or friendly gathering oi 
seniors in any of our colleges, and hear the 
familiar talk on this subject, we should hear it 
said, first, that the young man who goes to a 
theological seminary goes pledged in advance to 
certain convictions, of which he has never ex- 
amined the grounds satisfactorily. To make his 
training at the seminary of any practical use to 
him, he has got to say, at the end of the course, 
that he believes in each and all of certain 

6* 



130 WHAT CAREER? 

formulas of doctrine, regarding which he is, at 
this present moment, only partially informed. 
It would be said that no such implied pledge 
restricted him in going to a law school or a 
medical school. He might believe opium to be 
a good drug in practice, or a bad drug ; and yet 
no professor or school would follow him into the 
world to stigmatize his practice. He might 
come out from a law school wholly ignorant of 
nine-tenths of the studies pursued there ; still, 
when he nailed up his shingle, no president 
of the law school would send messages after 
him, to say that his doctrine of mortmain was 
faulty, and that he was quite unsound in the 
theory of the civil law. The young doctor or 
the young attorney, it would be said, is left to 
stand or fall on his own merits. 

But a young clergyman, these seniors would 
tell us, has a very different career in the pro- 
fessional school. Whether it be a school of 
thirty-nine articles, of twenty, or of five, he is 
expected from the beginning to come out, 
squarely and loyally, the supporter of them all. 
So far as he has received money from any edu- 



WHAT CAREER? 131 

cation society to carry him through the expenses 
of his course there, he is under a pledge of 
honor, if not of verbal contract, to do the duty 
for which they pay this money to prepare him. 
And, if he is under no such formal pledge, his 
difficulty is the same. If, as he goes forward in 
his studies, he should doubt even the least tittle 
of the formulas put down in the books, — if he 
should think modern science had something to 
say which in these books is neglected, — the 
officers of the school would mark his dissent. 
It would be their duty, indeed, to do so. And, 
go where he might, they would — as from their 
point of view they ought to do — follow him 
up with letter or warning to this, that, or an- 
other synod, consistory, consociation, or associa- 
tion, to say that, though of admirable moral 
character, he was unsound in faith. 

Now, young men do not like to enter on 
a course of study which, as they suppose, is 
thus hampered. 

The next thing we should hear said, in such 
talk of seniors, would be, that there was nothing 
to study in " theology " that any man was much 



182 WHAT CAREER? 

interested in. We should hear that a man must 
"get up" a new language, — namely, Hebrew, 
— while he knew he was not really master of 
Greek, Latin, or the modern languages. Then 
we should be told that the rest of the time at 
a theological school is spent in studying Greek 
and criticising the New Testament; in writing 
sermons and in hammering over Calvin's In- 
stitutes. This is about the popular idea which 
most seniors have of studying theology. The 
men who have really heard the gospel-trumpet 
sound, who know in their own hearts what the 
Holy Spirit is because the Holy Spirit has spoken 
to them, may have courage to take on the armor 
thus offered to them, because they are told it is 
useful armor. Many of them do take it on ; but 
the majority of men solicited to take it, refuse. 
They are Christian men, born again into the 
divine life, as truly as are the young men who 
go into the schools of theology. But they hesi- 
tate before attempting more Latin and Greek, 
before launching upon Hebrew, before spend- 
ing three years on what seem to them merely 
technical studies. They say what is true, that 



WHAT CAREER? 133 

there are many ways in which a man can work 
for the kingdom of God outside the pulpit; 
and that, if the pulpit require this preparation, 
other men may take it, but they will not. They 
enter upon some other profession. 

Now, in answer to the impression which is 
popular among seniors, and which we have 
attempted thus to describe in its detail, I write 
this essay, to show in brief what a theological 
school is, and what it is not, when it is at work 
on a true footing. I say, in the outset, that 
such a theory of a theological seminary as I have 
described is a gross caricature on any theological 
seminary in this land. And I say, next, that 
when a first-class theological seminary of one of 
the liberal communions is contrasted with such 
a theory, every one of the objections which 
young men make to such institutions without 
knowing what they are, disappears. 

First, as to the subjects studied. I venture 
the statement that all the great questions of 
modern discussion in which the young life of 
this country is specially interested, are nowhere 
studied in America so thoroughly as in its best 
theological seminaries. 



134 WHAT CAREER? 

Ask at the bookstores what those questions 
are, or ask the secretary of a debating club. 
The answer will be, first, that all the questions 
regarding the creation of the world and the ori- 
gin of man are the leading questions, — evolu- 
tion, protoplasm, Darwinism as, for convenience, 
people say. Every wide-awake senior has read 
Darwin, or the reviews of Darwin, — Mivart, 
perhaps : he has read a few articles on the theo- 
ries discussed by these gentlemen ; and the sub- 
ject involved has been the subject of the familiar 
discussion of the philosophical circles among 
young men. 

Now, where is a man to study this subject? 
Where, in the first place, can he get the books 
about it, — German, French, and English? He 
will find them in a well-furnished theological 
library. He will not find them anywhere else. 

In the second place, if he wants to find any 
professor vitally interested in the study, who 
will manfully introduce it into his courses, and 
give the last word of science with regard to it, 
as well as the view which science has taken of it 
for twenty-five hundred years, he must seek 



WHAT CAREER? 135 

that professor in a theological seminary. He 
may find the man in what is called a scientific 
college ; but he will not find there any course 
of lectures devoted to such subjects. The bread- 
and-butter studies pursued there do not permit 
much use of time in speculation. Precisely the 
line of speculation in which at this moment the 
world is most interested is, from the nature 
of the case, — because it is speculation, and 
is not what is called practical, — shut out from 
all the American schools except the theological 
seminaries. They are, and for a long time must 
be, our only schools of pure philosophy. 

Take another set of questions, the questions 
of race, on which all young men of intelligence 
of our times think a great deal and talk a great 
deal. Chinese question, African question, Cath- 
olic question, — they all hinge on questions of 
race. Who studies these questions of race? 
Do the lawyers study them? Not they ; they 
are no affair of theirs. Do the medical schools ? 
Scarcely ; the pulse of a Calmuck and the pulse 
of a Hottentot beat in much the same way. 
The theologians do study them ; they have to 



136 WHAT CAREER? 

study them. Dr. Clarke's book on " The Ten 
Great Religions " is based on his lectures as 
a professor of theology. Dr. Everett's studies 
of Confucius are studies made for his classes in 
theology. " The Ethnic Religions," as they are 
called, which involve the full study of the rela- 
tions of the races to each other, are studied in 
the theological seminaries, and nowhere besides. 
Then there are the social-science questions, 
as people call them, for want of a better name. 
These occupy largely the attention of young 
men : questions of the relations of classes to 
each other, of labor to capital, of poverty to 
wealth, of emigrants to native citizens, of pris- 
ons, of punishment, of the " social evil," of the 
relief of pauperism, and other questions of this 
class. All men of sense are interested in these 
questions, — nay, all men of sense have to deal 
with them in life. Now, with regard to these 
questions, as with regard to the questions of the 
theory of creation, the books of reference alone 
are not to be found outside a well-furnished 
public library, collected with a view to the 
study. No law library contains such books, 



WHAT CAREER? 1ST 

though in a broad sense it ought to. Social sci- 
ence is a specialty which thus far in this coun- 
try has not made large collections. The young 
man interested in the discussions it involves 
will have to go to a well-furnished theological 
or university library to get his materials. And 
a theological seminary of the first class is the 
only place where he will find many persons in- 
terested in the same inquiries. He will find 
them there. He will find one or more professors 
personally well-informed in the details of the 
subject. He will find fellow-students who make 
it their special study ; who propose to them- 
selves the struggle with the blunders and evils 
of society as their work in life. Much of the 
student life and vital interest of a theological 
school is given to the methods and direction of 
such a struggle. 

Now, I do not pretend that a young man 
entering on a course of theology at most theo- 
logical seminaries would be permitted to choose 
simply such philosophical or practical studies as 
these, — which happen to attract young men, — 
and to pass by other studies in the curriculum. 



188 WHAT CAEEEB? 

What I wish to show is, that, in the curriculum 
of a well-furnished seminary, the very topics of 
philosophy most interesting to the public miiid 
now occupy a very large place, though they be 
shielded and concealed from the public eye 
under such old-fashioned and academic phrases 
as "systematic theology," and "philosophy ot 
religion." I will attempt now to unravel some 
of the other phrases, which, in the programmes 
of the schools, cover over a set of interests 
which all young men of intelligence share. 

"Ecclesiastical history" is a great bugbear. 
" They have to spend so much time in ecclesias- 
tical history." Popularly, in the average stu- 
dent mind, it is supposed that this is the study 
of lists of popes, of the dates in which Scotch 
synods sat, and of the order of the apostolic 
succession of Bishop Colenso and of the Rev. 
Mr. Knickerbacker. The truth is that ecclesi- 
astical history is the history of the world, studied 
on the side of ideas rather than on the side of 
forms or statistics. History studied as Gibbon 
or Milman or Buckle or Lecky or Carlyle or 
Michelet study it, is ecclesiastical history. His- 



WHAT CAKEEli? 139 

tory studied in its outside or pictorial form, as 
Livy studies it, or Suetonius, or Richard of 
Devizes, or Hume or Prescott, is only an aux- 
iliary to ecclesiastical history. Now, we need 
only refer to the real and lasting popularity of 
such books as Stanley's " Lectures on Church 
History," to show that the philosophical or ideal 
method, the only true and comprehensive 
method, is at the same time the method which 
really interests intelligent people. And here 
again, as before, I have a right to say that phil- 
osophical history is scarcely studied anywhere 
else in this country but in the better arranged 
theological seminary. The School of History, 
in Cornell, and the classes at Charlottesville, 
Va., are the only striking exceptions which I 
remember. So far from its being a study en- 
cumbered with detail of the methods of admin- 
istration of the so-called " Church " of its time, 
it is very indifferent to such chaff, which gets 
itself forgotten very speedily. Dealing with 
such subjects as the Puritan Revolution in Eng- 
land, the Reformation in all its forms, the civil- 
ization of the north of Europe, the abolition of 



140 WHAT CAREER • 

slavery in the Roman Empire, the establishment 
of the civil law, the diffusion of letters over the 
world, — to name only three or four essential 
points of consideration, — it is wholly impossible 
that " ecclesiastical history " should be either a 
dry or an unpractical study. 

"Homiletics " again. " Who, in his senses," 
says the average senior, "would study homi- 
letics ? " Well, I confess I am tempted to ask 
what dean of a theological school in his senses 
would put an old-fashioned word like " homi- 
letics " into his programme of study; or rather 
a word like this, which was never in fashion. 
Homiletics is the science of address: the sci- 
ence, so far as it can be put in science, by which 
such men as Beecher and Wendell Phillips and 
Charles Finney and Newman Hall and Frederic 
Robertson and Charles Spurgeon affect in speech 
their fellow-men, when they want to affect them. 
Is it, or is it not, worth while to learn any thing 
about that? Is that, or is it not, an interesting 
study? To the average American student, 
whose duty and destiny it is to move throngs of 
men by the way in which he shall state to them 



WHAT CAREER? 141 

the truth, is it, or is it not, an important study ? 
But people say, " Homiletics sound like 4 homily,' 
and homilies are supposed to be dull ! " No 
matter what it sounds like : it is the science of 
address. I never understood that anybody who 
sat under the preaching of Ward Beecher or 
Robert Collyer, the chiefs of homiletics just 
now, found their preaching dull. Precisely be- 
cause they knew something of homiletics, was 
their preaching vital and entertaining. 

I have before me the programme of the work 
of the Theological Seminary at Cambridge, 
where the " homiletics " are under the charge of 
Prof. Everett, a gentleman who is one of the 
few poets who are at the same time writing 
metaphysicians. He is the man who has written 
the one thorough statement of " The Science of 
Thought " which has appeared in the English 
language, so careful and accurate is his process 
of reasoning. On the other hand, he is a born 
poet, and sees the natural illustration of every 
spiritual truth on the instant that the truth 
asserts itself. That man, by good fortune, is 
placed in the position of teaching young men 



142 WHAT CAREER? 

how to address audiences. Does any. one who 
ever heard him, suppose that his presentation of 
that subject will be antiquated or dull ? 

And jet again I am tempted to ask, What 
place is there, after a man has left college, where 
he will be taught any thing of this essential 
business of addressing other men, except in a 
theological seminary? Certainly not in a law 
school, unless by good luck there is a spirited 
debating club among the students. Certainly 
not in a medical school. The doctors suffer till 
the day they die, from their inability to tell 
other men in public speech what they want to 
say to them. The chairs of the better theologi- 
cal seminaries alone supply this necessity ; and 
they veil it under the unintelligible and disre- 
garded title of the " homiletics.' , 

There remain, of the studies of a well-appointed 
theological school, the criticism of the Bible and 
the science of ethics. These are unquestion- 
ably those at which the average senior, w r hom 
we have tried to describe, looks most suspiciously. 
Like a horse free in the pasture, he sniffs at the 
Bait in the proffered measure, but determines, on 



WHAT CAREER? 143 

the whole, that he prefers freedom without salt, 
to salt with a halter. He throws up his heels 
in the luxury of life without a tether, and gal* 
lops to the farther part of the enclosure ; and 
his freedom ends in such liberty as he may 
find in a lawyer's office, or within sound of a 
doctor's bell, or as a principal of an academy ! 

What, then, is the critical study of the Old 
Testament and the New ? It is the scientific, 
philosophical, manly study of a series of books 
which, as any Christian man believes, nay, 
knows, are of the very first importance to the 
world. And does any Christian man really say 
that he means to get along with any thing less 
than the scientific, philosophical, manly study of 
these books ? Does he really mean to take his 
opinion of them at second hand, — and at sec- 
ond hand, perhaps, from very questionable or 
very ill-educated teachers? If a man really 
means that he knows more and better than is 
taught in the Sermon on the Mount, or that he 
can come nearer God than the Saviour brings 
him in the fourteenth chapter of John, that is 
one thing. That man may, with a certain con- 



144 WHAT CAREER? 

sistency, excuse himself from careful and ade- 
quate study of the Bible ; but even in that con- 
sistency there is a lamentable confession : " I 
know very little of the Bible ; therefore I do 
not want to know any more." But, not to 
inquire into the duty or the choice cf that 
man, — for other men, for men who have found 
Jesus Christ to be their living help, and the 
Holy Spirit the true leader of life, — is it a 
natural or a consistent thing for them to say 
that they are satisfied with a Sunday-school 
knowledge of our indifferent version of the 
Bible, and that they will not attempt to extend 
that knowledge by a systematic or critical study 
of it in the original? To say the very least, 
have such men a right to pronounce, a priori^ 
that such study must be functional, formal, 
and dull? 

To speak very briefly of the last fifty years 
alone. The opening of the Egyptian hierogly- 
phics has made a new thing of the five books as- 
cribed to Moses ; the opening up of the Assyrian 
and other Eastern inscriptions, and the daily re- 
ports of researches and travels in the East, have 



WHAT CAREER? 145 

made a new thing of the study of the historical 
books of the Old Testament. The emancipation 
of Christianity from the dogmas of the darkest 
ages has reopened the whole subject of the per- 
son, nature, and character of Christ. Seeley's 
"Ecce Homo," Renan's "Jesus," Furness's 
book with the same title, Parker's " Ecce Deus," 
Derenbourg's "History of Palestine," "Geikie's 
Christ," and a hundred other recent books, show 
that this is so. For the study of the relations 
of Christianity to the history, social order, and 
philosophy of the Roman Empire, which is the 
subject of the critical study of the Epistles, 
such books in popular circulation as Merivale's, 
Dezobry's, and Lecky's "History of Morals," 
are enough to show that that study is to-day 
a study as fresh and as important as it ever 
was. 

Lastly, with regard to ethics or morals, no 
intelligent or high-minded young gentleman will 
enter into any discussion with me. It will be 
acknowledged, on all hands, to be the most vital 
and suggestive subject of our familiar thought 
and conversation. 



146 WHAT CAREER? 

Thus much reason have I for saying that a 
theological seminary, so far from confining itself 
to obsolete subjects of study, addresses itself to 
the most important and vital subjects of the 
day, if it is true to its position ; nay, must do 
so, from the very law of its being. And thus 
much reason have I for saying that such a 
school, instead of pursuing certain antiquated 
methods, such as would be called functional, is 
in fact at this moment the only school we have 
of philosophy proper, speaking in distinction 
from that study of smoke and dust which is 
now called natural philosophy or science, to 
which we owe the present enthusiasm for what 
are called scientific schools. 

Now, in reply to this statement, I expect to be 
told that the theological schools of the country 
are not true to their position. I shall be told 
at this point that what I have said is an ac- 
count of what they ought to be, but that in fact 
they are something very different; that their 
professors do not dare enter freely into the pop- 
ular questions of the day; and the students do 



WHAT CAREER? 147 

not dare take them up without the countenance 
of the professors. 

It is here, therefore, that I have to say that 
all that I have written I have written with 
the constant use of the programme of one of 
the oldest and best seminaries in this country, — 
that at Cambridge. I have no reason to doubt 
that many other schools can say what I say dis- 
tinctly of this, from its printed reports and from 
official opportunities of visit and information. 
This school is under the nominal government of 
the Corporation of Harvard College; in fact, 
its arrangements are made by its own Faculty, 
who are, — 

Dr. Oliver Stearns, as well known West as 
East. 

Dr. Frederic H. Hedge, the author of "He- 
brew Tradition," " Reason in Religion," " The 
Collection of German Prose Writers," and so 
many other books. 

Dr. James Freeman Clarke, author among 
other books, of "The Ten Great Religions of 
the World," "The Steps of Belief," "The 
Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy." 



148 WHAT CAREER? 

Dr. Charles Carroll Everett, author of " The 
Science of Thought," to which I have alluded. 

Prof. Edward James Young, one of our most 
successful students in Germany as in America. 

Besides these, Prof. Sophocles, the author of 
" The Byzantine Dictionary ; " Prof. Abbot, the 
American editor of Smith's " Bible Dictionary;" 
and several Boston clergymen, — lecture in the 
school. 

Now, will anybody pretend to say that gen- 
tlemen who have in print and before the world 
used the free, broad, and scientific system which 
all of these gentlemen have illustrated, will, in 
their relations with a few students, be narrow, 
functional, bigoted, or petty? Can such words 
in any fashion be applied to such men? Can 
any reason be conceived why they should not 
do their best to make the study they have in 
hand broad, natural, suggestive, and even with 
the times? I am convinced that if any young 
man who believes in study which is study, will 
inquire of any student like himself in that, who 
is now in the Cambridge Divinity school, he will 
be told that the studies there pursued are in fact 



WHAT CAREEPw? 149 

pursued in the broadest, most generous, and phil- 
osophical spirit. Nor have I any reason to say 
that the same may not be asserted of the other 
leading theological seminaries in the country. 

There remains to be examined the familiar 
statement which we placed first, that, on enter- 
ing a theological seminary, a young man pledges 
himself in advance to certain opinions of which 
he is yet to examine the foundations. 

This charge, however true it may have been 
of other eras of the Church, is not in any sense 
true of the Divinity School at Cambridge ; and 
I suppoes it to be equally untrue of other leading 
theological seminaries. Of course, if a man is 
not a Christian, he will not wish to enter on a 
course of studies which are arranged to train 
him to be an effective Christian minister. The 
presumption is, undoubtedly, that men who study 
theology in Christian theological seminaries will 
try their abilities in the Christian ministry. 
But even to this they are not pledged at Cam- 
bridge. I doubt if they are so pledged at any in- 
stitution of the first rank. Undoubtedly, before 
a young man accepts the flattering help of what 



150 WHAT CAREER? 

are called " beneficiary funds," he should inquire 
very carefully what are the relations in which 
the acceptance of such funds involve him. 
They belong to a system wholly un-American, 
and which has no parallel in any thing else in 
our social order. But I can conceive of cases 
where the use of such funds shall imply no 
pledge as to the after-course of the man who 
uses them. And, however that may be, the en- 
trance into a first-class theological seminary in 
itself, and the use of its advantages, involve no 
compromise of opinion whatever. At Cam- 
bridge, any man who can pass the simple liter- 
ary examination, and is of good moral character, 
may enter. Any man who passes the regular 
term-examinations, and retains his moral char- 
acter, may graduate, whatever his' theological 
opinions. If he have been well prepared for 
entrance, and have used his three years to ad- 
vantage, he may take the degree of Bachelor of 
Divinity ; and this degree is open to him, what- 
ever his theological convictions. Chunder Sen 
could take it, or Pio Nono, if they could pass, 
as I suppose they both could, the examinations* 



WHAT CAREER? 151 

There remains the question, whether the pro- 
fession of the Christian ministry is worth the 
three years' preparation, supposing that a man 
find in the course of that time that he can fit 
himself for it respectably. Thus far I have in- 
tentionally avoided this question. I have re- 
garded the theological seminary as what it is, — 
the one professional school which enlarges and 
continues the range of philosophical and specu- 
lative studies in which, at college, a young man 
begins. Neither of the other schools professes 
to do this. They profess to select a single walk 
of life, — law, medicine, physics, or engineer- 
ing, and to prepare for that ; but a theological 
school is different. Because God rules every 
thing, all law in whatever line, moral, physical, 
or historical, may be studied there ; and where 
the school is rightly organized, it is studied 
there. A theological seminary, therefore, takes 
up and enlarges the line of study in the college. 

Now, I will frankly meet the question regard - 
ing the interest or value of the ministry itself 
to a man choosing his profession in our time. 
The popular idea of the life of a clergyman is 



152 WHAT CAREER? 

that lie spends his mornings in writing sermons 
and translating Hebrew, and his afternoons in 
visiting sick people and burying the dead. The 
supposition is that he does all this in a certain 
pre-ordained or conventional way, which leaves 
very little play for imagination, fancy, personal- 
character, or indeed for the intellect in any of 
its enterprises. As this is the popular idea, it 
probably enters largely into the discussions of 
such a club of seniors as I have imagined 
looking forward upon their profession. Now I 
confess that if young men, with the enthusiasm, 
vitality, and ambition of young men, liked any 
such life as that, or could be largely bought into 
it by the bribes of any education societies, I 
should think very sadly of our times. I believe 
it is because young men believe in action, ad- 
vance, and in the improvement of society, that 
in general they reject the proposals made to 
them to enter such a profession, about which, 
for one or another reason, there hangs such a 
reputation. And I believe that the bounties 
paid by the education societies have clouded the 
matter more, and made it worse than before 



WHAT CAREER? 153 

In point of fact, and as I observe society, this 
description of the life of an American clergy- 
man is ridiculously untrue. Perhaps it would 
be better if a few more of them did study their 
Hebrew in the morning. Certainly the number 
that do may be counted on the fingers of a man's 
hands. It would not be fair, perhaps, to ask as 
to the private life of Bishop Simpson, Phillips 
Brooks, Bishop Huntington, or Dr. Bellows ; 
but I am disposed to believe that there are 
few more active men in the community. As 
for general influence on the public, I must say 
that the one thing certain at school meetings, 
college meetings, Indian meetings, meetings to 
welcome and meetings to say farewell, natural- 
history meetings, public-library meetings, or 
meetings of whatever sort which have our en- 
larging civilization in hand, — is that the men 
you will meet are clergymen. Nor is the do- 
main of literature to be forgotten. It is not 
by accident that, among the few first-class 
names in our literary history, the names of such 
leaders as Channing, Everett, Sparks, Bancroft, 
Emerson, and Ripley should be the names of 
7* 



154 WHAT CAREER? 

clergymen. There is but one profession which 
of necessity trains men to express themselves 
simply, distinctly, and from conviction ; and that 
profession was theirs. And if any man asks the 
question of general influence on men, I should 
be glad to be told what man at the bar, in medi- 
cine, or in any walk of physical science to-day, 
meets so many men directly or indirectly in 
America, whom he may attempt to move by 
personal appeal in print, or by the influence of 
those on whom he acts, as do the great preach- 
ers or ministers, — such men as Dr. Bacon, 
Bishop Simpson, Dr. Bellows, Henry Ward 
Beecher, or Edwin Hubbell Chapin? 

The theological seminary which shall first de- 
vise a method of showing to its students, in 
their vacations from the study of books and of 
ideas, the romantic and exciting detail of the 
life of a working minister ; the seminary which 
will give them what the best medical schools do 
in giving a clinique to their students, — will, as 
I believe, become the most popular of profes- 
sional schools, if only its conductors remember 
that, for the study of truth, the first requisite is 
freedom. 



WHAT CAREER? 155 

VI. 

CHARACTER. 

TVTO study is more impressive than the study 
of monuments ; or of dictionaries of biog- 
raphy, which in their way are monuments. As 
you ride into Palmyra, you pass for miles on 
the right and left the bases of lost statues. On 
these bases are carved the names of the men 
who were represented there. But the names 
do not preserve the memory of those men, more 
than the broken statues. The men were to 
be forgotten, and they are forgotten. 

On the other hand Zenobia, Queen of Pal 
myra, has a name that lives. Longinus, one of 
her ministers, has a name that lives. There are 
no statues of Zenobia in Palmyra, — none of 
Longinus. But, with or without statues, they 
live, because there was something in them of 
the living sort. They were made to live. 

These miles of statues were reared to the 
Captains of Caravans who had taken Roman 



156 WHAT CAREER? 

gentlemen safely and comfortably across the 
desert. We all know how much attached we 
become to a captain of a steamship, who has 
brought us over well. In the old days of sailing 
vessels and long passages to and from Europe, 
a frequent custom and a grateful one, indeed, 
was for the passengers to subscribe for a piece 
of silver plate for the captain who had served 
them. It seems that in those older days of 
Palmyra there was a similar habit. I suppose 
that, when the last day of the tedious caravan 
journey came, some active, busy traveller, who 
had no family to attend to, bustled round with 
a subscription paper, and made up a purse for a 
statue of the commander. Then a good artist 
was found in Palmyra, and one more statue was 
added to the long line of fame. 

There is a like story of the decline of Athens. 
Athens ordered that three hundred and sixty 
statues should be erected to Demetrius Phale- 
reus, one of the popular rulers of that time. 
But three hundred and sixty statues have not 
saved his name from forgetfulness. In contrast 
with that, as Nepos says, Miltiades, who saved 



WHAT CAREER? 157 

Athens from the Turk of his day, will always be 
remembered, — though the monument to him 
was only a poor water-color, which soon faded, 
on a temple-wall. 

These stories are good enough illustrations of 
the eternal law, — that character is the only 
permanent reality in human life ; and that we 
cannot substitute brass or marble, not granite 
nor gold as a substitute. It may happen that a 
monument, like Cleopatra's needle, takes a name 
which the steadfast memory of men gives to it, 
in the place of the forgotten inscription once 
carved on its corner-stone. By the same law, 
they tell you at Kenilworth that Cromwell de- 
stroyed Lord Leicester's Castle. All the per- 
sonal actors in its destruction are forgotten ; but 
Cromwell is of the type of men who live. 

Literary men are for ever trying to rake out 
of the ashes of the past some old bit of badly 
melted slag, and telling us that it is good coal, 
or perhaps diamond, and that it should not be 
forgotten. Every now and then somebody tries 
to write up Abelard in this way. A few years 
ago, an accomplished scholar here tried to gal- 



158 WHAT CAREER? 

vanize Charles the Bold, and make him live. 
But the poor corpses will not stand up long 
enough for men to apply the batteries which 
should make them twitch and start. There is 
nothing to live. 

It is of no great consequence whether men 
are remembered or forgotten. But this persist- 
ency of character, in its hold on the memory of 
men, — if they have once found out that there is 
a character to remember, — is a good illustration 
of the absolute or eternal force of character, 
and the steady and certain victory which it com- 
mands. At the moment men never understand 
it. The town cannot understand why Charles, 
whom it thinks dull, moves steadily forward, 
while George, whom it thought brilliant, is more 
and more certainly set on one side. But the 
reason is that George is only brilliant, while 
Charles had the weight and force of character. 
In my early life, I was so placed at one time, in 
the discharge of my daily duty, as to be com- 
pletely dependent, for two or three hours per- 
haps of each day, on the will or whim of two 
public functionaries. The superior in rank of 



WHAT CAREER? 159 

these two was a man of unswerving truth and 
honor, who was however lonely, low-toned, low- 
spirited, probably selfish, certainly unsympathiz- 
ing. The result or combination of these qual- 
ities made him what we familiarly call " cross " 
to everybody who came in his way. Many a 
day have I lost my dinner, and sunk hours of 
useless life, because this man would not pass a 
sheet of paper across his desk for me to copy, 
until his own work was fully done, and his own 
later dinner-hour come. The younger of these 
two men, his inferior in rank, was also a man 
of unswerving truth and honor, of whom then I 
knew little but that he was quick, sympathetic, 
unselfish, and kind. He did his own work well, 
was glad to see others do theirs well ; had ex- 
actly the same kind of work to do that the 
other had, but always helped us boys along ; 
taught us if we needed teaching, was willing 
to help us if the State took no peril, and won, 
of course, our enthusiastic love. 

This man rapidly rose up the steps of our 
social system, received, one after another, the 
highest honors which this State has to give to 



160 WHAT CAREER? 

a man in his profession, and died, only too 
young for us, having attained a name which 
will long be remembered in the walk of life to 
which his life was given. The other, at the 
first overturn in politics, lost his place ; so did 
his junior. But my cross friend never regained 
his, nor indeed any position of trust. Not he. 
" I care for nobody, no, not I ; and nobody 
cares for me." That is the law of such men. 
I used to meet him in the street, every year or 
two, as I grew older and older. He looked 
every time rather more sour and rather more 
hard than the time before. I am perfectly sure 
that all this time he was satisfying himself that 
the world was an unjust world and a very hard 
world. I do not know, but I think, that the 
wolf came nearer to his door and nearer with 
every year. And when, after twenty or more 
years, I read the record of his death also in the 
newspaper, I felt sadly sure that the grave had 
closed over a man who was only too willing to go ; 
and who died, saying that the world had not 
treated him fairly. 

Well, I do not say that the world is a just 



WHAT CAREER? 161 

world, nor that time can be always relied upon 
for a verdict. It is the kingdom of heaven 
which is the kingdom of justice ; and only 
eternity can be relied upon for the truth. But 
I do say that I believe that in this case of those 
two men the verdict was substantially a just 
verdict ; and that one of them was rewarded 
and the other punished because of differences 
of character, which were wholly within their 
own control. Yet it may be that neither of 
those men was aware of the character which he 
himself bore. 

For character is very different from reputa- 
tion, though we mix the names so often. The 
English servant who wants a place, advertises 
that he has a three years' character: meaning 
that he has three years' reputation since any- 
body has knowu him who is willing to testify 
for him, or since he lost his good reputation in 
some tavern or some brawl. But though he 
talks of a three-years' "character," his real 
character has been forming since he drew his 
first breath. The great trip-hammer of the 
mint of God hits us hard, and hits us again 



162 WHAT CAREER? 

and hits us again ; and, with every blow, the 
metal struck changes its lustre, changes its 
strength, even, changes the image and the 
superscription. The word character is true still 
to its derivation. It is a Greek word, wholly 
unchanged, which the Greeks derived from the 
word which we pronounce harass, which they 
pronounced char ass ^apdacrco'), but which had 
the meaning then that it has now. They spoke 
then of a coin in the mint, which was hammered 
and tortured by the sharp edges of the die, as 
being stamped upon indeed, as a poor charassed 
thing, — as bearing a character. Its character 
came to it because it was beaten, pounded by 
this tremendous hammer. The more it was 
beaten, the more distinct character it had. I 
believe all our words of similar import have a 
similar derivation. Thus, when we say a man 
is of this " type " of manhood, or that " type " 
of manhood, the original meaning is that he has 
been beaten into that shape by the blows of life 
which have passed over him. And it is true 
that a man's character begins when he is born, 
and changes or does not change accordingly as 



WHAT CAREER? 163 

ae bears the pounding which life gives him. 
Burns says " The rank is but the guinea's 
stamp." This means, at bottom, that a " pound " 
is metal which has been pounded. And there 
are metals which improve in quality all the 
time you stamp and hammer them. Just the 
same is true of man, if he have the true 
heat, the true life, and make himself master of 
the circumstance instead of slave. Precisely, 
now, as you may have seen different strands of 
iron wire brought together in a bloom, heated 
red, and struck and struck under a trip-hammer 
till they are made one, so all the different ex- 
periences of life, — the lessons, for instance, 
which these papers are trying to set in order, 
— are fused and welded into one in the process 
of the formation of character. A man's habits 
of sleep, of exercise, and of appetite ; his meth- 
ods of reasoning, imagination, and memory; 
his faith, his hope, his love, — are blended to- 
gether in his character. And the hammering 
becomes no unimportant part of the process. 

Certain traits of character there are which 
show themselves all through the pounding, 



164 WHAT CAREER? 

Thus, all the hammering of eternity will not 
make iron into gold. But a very little hammer- 
ing will make pig-iron into wrought-iron, if you 
give it heat enough ; and, so hammered, it will 
bear a very different strain. 

I remember a lovely friend, who passed into 
heaven with less change perhaps than any other 
angel I ever saw pass from world to world. I 
remember she told me of a surprise of hers 
which exactly illustrates the permanency of 
some traits of character. But that life illus- 
trates as well the change which on such traits 
is effected. 

When she was twenty years old, her second 
mother called her and said : " You will like to 
see yourself as you were when I knew you first, 
a girl of six." So her mother put into her 
hands the letter which contained a descriptive 
catalogue of her faults and her merits, when, at 
six years old, the aunts who had trained her 
transferred her to this mother's care. The 
young woman read this early description with 
amazement. u I found there, in black and 
white," she said, " traits of mine which / knew 



WHAT CAREER? 165 

very well, but which, like an ostrich, I had been 
carefully concealing all my life, and which I 
supposed no one had ever noted except myself." 
All of us, perhaps, have had like experience, 
whether of inherited traits or of other predispo- 
sitions, which, showing themselves early, crop 
out all along the course of life, and are among 
the constants which are to be managed by a 
man's own will. And, as this same friend of 
mine found out, all the interest of life, and all 
its value, is in the managing them and shaping 
them. Character is the combined work of God 
and man in the minting. I may, indeed, keep 
to the same illustration of the Greeks, of the 
bar of iron. It is smelted and beaten, smelted 
and beaten again ; heated and drawn, heated 
and drawn again ; heated and cooled suddenly, 
heated and cooled slowly; heated, beaten, and 
cooled in every conceivable way, — till, in the 
shape of the hair-spring of my watch, or of the 
needle with which you sew, or of the index in 
the mariner's compass, it has properties and 
values wholly inconceivable to the man who 
only knew the crude lump of pig-iron. Who 



166 WHAT CAREER? 

has been the actor there ? The intelligent en- 
gineer, you say, who built the furnace and 
brought to it the charcoal and the fluxes ; who 
tamed the waterfall, and set in motion the gi- 
gantic wheels, and taught these trip-hammers 
to move, — now with a crashing blow ; now 
with so slight a movement that I can gently 
crack an egg-shell with it, and yet it shall not 
lose its form. Yes, the engineer is one of the 
actors. He is, if you please, the principal actor. 
But he is not the only actor. He needs, and 
therefore he has trained and has placed here, 
that quiet, brave, modest, swarthy workman, 
whom you see waiting by the furnace for the 
hot bloom of iron to be white ; who, at the fit 
moment, will seize it and slide it to its place 
under the trip-hammer ; who then will fix it 
there, that it shall profit by the blow ; who will 
turn it from side to side that it shall be squarely 
shaped ; and who, when fit moment comes, shall 
cool it in the water which has been prepared. 
You say he is only a day -laborer. That is true. 
You say he is ignorant, unskilled in the great 
powers of the universe, and could never have 



WHAT CAREER? 167 

set in order this giant system of which, he is a 
part. That is true. But he is a part of it, all 
the same, and an essential part. The engineer 
placed him here to do this duty, and relied on 
his courage and conduct and fortitude, and on 
his original thought and discretion, that it might 
be done well. Nay, the engineer trained him, 
called out his hidden powers, and made him 
partner in his undertaking. Yes; and the 
workman has implicit faith in the mill, and in 
him that runs it, — risks his life on that faith ; 
and because he trusts to the waterfall, to the 
furnace, and to the directing skill that sets the 
whole in order, he is what he is, and aids in 
the triumph of the whole. But for that man, 
ignorant and weak though he be, the bloom 
of iron would never become tough bar, elas- 
tic sword-blade, or prophetic needle. Place it 
under the trip-hammer and let this man leave 
it for twenty seconds, and then see how little 
" character" it gains, though the iron mill go 
steadily forward in its preordained career. 

That interaction of the humble workman with 
the directing engineer is a fit enough representor 



168 WHAT CAREER? 

tion of the interaction with God of man or 
woman, who are his little children, — fellow- 
laborers with him in this tempering and purifying 
and stamping which makes up " character." God 
does not foreordain it. He is too kind for that. 
We cannot create it, we are too short-sighted for 
that. But God working in us, and we working 
with him ; in summer days of loveliness, in the 
night struggles of winter horror; in the long 
brooding of wakeful nights, when he is the 
only companion ; or in that exquisite intimacy 
with her the dearest or with him the strongest, 
which is the choicest gift of a God of love, — 
God with his children and his children with 
him, year in, year out, in boyhood, girlhood, 
manhood, womanhood, they form together the 
character which seems such a mystery. 

There is no adequate science of human life, 
which does not fitly place and fitly state this 
interaction of the two free agents who direct it. 
The life of a man differs from the life of the 
palm tree, or of the branching coral, precisely 
in this distinction, — that the man may or may 
not " accept the universe." He is free to work 



WHAT CAREER? 169 

with God if he chooses, or to oppose him if he 
can. According as he works with him, or as he 
works against him, is his success or his failure 
in the regular formation of his character. 

Hiram Withington, a friend of my youth, 
whom we lost in the freshness of his promise, 
said the regularity or the irregularity of this for- 
mation was typified in the stratification of the 
great coal regions of the world. He said that 
every word of our lips, every act of our hands, 
every step of our feet, every thought of our 
brain, every emotion of our heart, and every 
vision of our fancy might be looked upon as so 
many dancing leaves in an autumn wind, tossed 
hither, tossed thither, rising now, floating then, 
but in the end all falling to the ground, all 
soaked together in a cold, clammy mass, by 
the dews and rains of successive night-falls ; all 
melted together at last in the heats of trial, and 
crowded together under the pressure of adver- 
sity, and cooled together in winters of desola- 
tion, till in the end they made the rock which 
we call character. We speak of character as if 
it were solid and uniform, but in truth it is all 
8 



170 WHAT CAREER? 

seamed and layered by these traces of our old 
life , and one has only to tap the rock here or 
there, or where he will, and the thin strata will 
lie open as if it were only yesterday that they 
were crowded together ; and jou shall find the 
fibres and tissues, nay, you shall find the micro- 
scopic cell and the fine down of the leaf, as if it 
were only yesterday that it had fallen. Each 
vision, each emotion, each thought, each step, 
each act, and each word thus combine in the 
necessary processes of human life to make up 
the rock which we call character. 

Now, it is according to the worth and might 
of this character that the man or woman suc- 
ceeds or fails. Let me return to my cross 
and gentle masters, of whom I have spoken 
already. For here is what men and women are 
always forgetting ; what both of them, perhaps, 
forget. If the character is light and trivial, no 
matter how elegant the accomplishment nor how 
ingenious the tool of one's labor. So there be 
no might and force behind, tool and accomplish- 
ment are flung away ; and, as human lives are 
tested by whatever fire or whatever flood, the 



WHAT CAREER? 171 

revelation which is made, and cannot be escaped, 
is a revelation of how much might and force 
and strength of character there is in the man. 
Pathetic enough is it to see this in any moment 
of history. In Queen Anne's time, for instance, 
a hundred and seventy years ago in England, 
there were noblemen and noble-women, court 
beauties, court jesters, and court gallants in 
London ; there were politicians working for the 
queen, and politicians working against her ; there 
were actors and actresses who were the talk and 
toast of all England, poets and other writer? 
who were libelling each other, libelling half the 
people in the land, and not forgetting to libel 
the crown. In the midst of them all was Isaac 
Newton, whom every one respected ; yes, but 
neither courtier, actor, poet, nor satirist knew 
that his work, his power, and so his name would 
outlive them all. The prime minister rode to 
his office, and nattered himself that Newton was 
specially gratified when his lordship recognized 
him as he passed in at the office door, — Newton 
being master of the mint. To give a man an 
appointment in the mint was the only way in 



172 WHAT CAREER? 

which Government could acknowledge, what 
the Government knew, that here was the great 
thinker, great scholar, great man of the time. 
Well, time rolls by, and we find what was what. 
First, the memory of the actors' and the act- 
resses' paint and powder die. Then dies the 
memory of the trashy plays they acted. Then 
dies the memory of the intrigues of the men of 
party. Treaty of this, treaty of that; Marl- 
borough's victories, Bolingbroke's lies, — we have 
forgotten them all. By and by the books are re- 
membered only as names in literature. Persons 
of tact who know they ought to have them in 
their libraries are tempted to make the sets out 
of wood with well-gilt leather covers. Of Mr. 
Pope, a man of true genius, by far the most 
brilliant author of them all, a Harvard grad- 
uate said the other day to Mr. Fields, as they 
looked upon his portrait, " Were you acquainted 
with Mr. Pope, Mr. Fields ? " So the fire of time 
tries these reputations. So the straw burns, 
the stubble, the lath, and the rafter ; the stucco 
and plaster crumble and give wa} r . But in 
the midst of it something remains : it is the 



WHAT CAREER? 173 

work which stands for character, and represents 
character. The work of Newton stands un- 
changed : his name too may be forgotten, but his 
work is here. He helped men one step nearer 
to their God. He brought in Law where all 
was lawless. He did this, he said, by untiring 
industry and determined perseverance, not by 
any flash of brilliant inspiration. On the strand 
of the Eternal Ocean he picked up a few peb- 
bles, and these pebbles are as truly jewels of 
eternal lustre as they ever were. 

" Nature and Nature's Law lay hid in night - 
God said ' Let Newton be,' and all was light." 

This is what one of those brilliant wits of his 
own time said of him, and said truly. And that 
service rendered by faith and courage to human- 
ity stands, and will stand. His name may be 
forgotten like the rest. But in the higher cer- 
tainty of truth, in the nearer walk with God, in 
the clearer significance of Law, are testimonies 
never to be lost of the might and wealth and 
worth of character. Work done for the day, by 
the creatures of a day, has died with the day. 
Work done for the eternities, by the eternal 



174 WHAT CAREER? 

powers which a child of God enlists in his ser- 
vice, is work as real now as it was then. The 
man's name is forgotten, or it is remembered. 
That is nothing. The work stands unchanged, 
and the contrast is the contrast between the 
worthlessness of mere accomplishment and the 
value to all time of the work of character. 

I think the habit of our country leads men to 
forget this contrast. 

True, there is not a wood-cutter in Maine or 
Minnesota but knows that the weight of the axe 
and the swiftness of the stroke are what tell in 
the cutting of the tree ; that the sharpness of 
the axe is nothing unless there be weight and 
swiftness behind it. There is not a man of 
them who would go into the wilderness expect- 
ing to clear his farm with sharp-bladed pen- 
knives or well-polished scissors. Yet the same 
men, as they look round for their heroes, as 
they give applause or as they give votes, are as 
likely as any men to be misled by the brilliancy 
of accomplishment, and to forget the necessity, 
if the work is to last, of the weight and force 
which only belong to character. I think our 



WHAT CAREER? 175 

habit — what was our necessity — of seeking 
immediate results, leads to this. As we burned 
down the forests, and now find too late that we 
have caused by our folly higher freshets in the 
spring and longer droughts in the summer, so 
we applaud some showy fool in the pulpit, 
or elect men to office for their ease in public 
speaking, to find only too late that the children 
do not know what the word religion means, and 
that the destinies of the State have not been 
confided to statesmen. This mistake, whenever 
it is committed, is the mistake of preferring 
accomplishment above character, — a mistake 
fatal whether it is made in education, in our 
estimate of ourselves and our plan of our duty, 
in our selection of other men for office, or in the 
verdict of praise and censure which we render 
to the servants of the State or of the Church. 

We meet every day the broken-bladed pen- 
knives, — people who have tried to do the work 
of axes, and have failed because they had not 
weight enough. Such men are looking round 
for patrons and letters of recommendation. 
They think this man was successful because of 



176 WHAT CAREER? 

his uncle's influence, and that one because he 
was a freemason ; and then say bitter things 
of society because society does not help them 
forward. The truth is, all the while, that 
there is nothing to help, nothing to endorse, 
nothing to rely upon. The man has failed, not 
because he had no uncles or no endorsers, but 
because he had no weight, no steadfastness, 
no character. 

And, on the other hand, I meet every day 
this man and that woman who cannot see why 
God leaves them to such petty detail in the 
work of his army. " Why should I be left to 
take care of babies, while Penthesilea can lead 
Amazons into action ? " " Why should I be left 
to take a class in a Sunday-school, while at my age 
William Pitt was Prime Minister of England ? " 
Why, but because the good God, who has some- 
thing better at stake than the work of Amazons 
or of prime ministers, has devised these schools 
for the creation of your character. Dear boy, 
you did nothing all last week, in your new 
employ, but to add up units and cany tens, and 
add tens and carry hundreds ; and you are sure 



WHAT CAREER? 177 

that you could have done so much more and so 
much better, but no man asked you. Is the 
new employ, for that, mere slavery to you? 
Only see what is the true sum of your figures 
and the true product of your multiplication. 
Be sure, you, that five years hence, when some- 
body wants a man of might, of trust, of honor, 
of integrity, and looks for him in that crypt 
where you are adding and multiplying, the 
search shall not be made in vain. Show, 
then, that among a thousand ciphers there 
is one real value. Among a thousand names, 
let there be one child of God. Show, then and 
there, what the service of five faithful years can 
do in creating character. 

As I watch men of affairs, I find one set who, 
as they say, make one hand wash another. 
They are rushing round at one o'clock to pick 
up the funds to pay the note which falls due 
at two. 

I find another set, more thoughtful, who 
know to-day what they are to do next Friday, — 
know, as they would say, where they shall be 
next Saturday, — who are thus prepared in ad 

8* 



178 WHAT CAREER? 

vance for any exigency in business. You can- 
not take them by surprise. 

And, once more, I hear of a third set some- 
times. I hear traditions of the great men of 
affairs, whose dealings have been governed by 
combinations which were years in maturing ; 
who knew how many acres of this world were 
planted with coffee four years before, how many 
three years before, what would be the probable 
crop two years after, and three, and four. Such 
are the men not satisfied to imitate their rivals, to 
do as others do, to work by rule of thumb ; but 
who have a principle, on which even commerce 
adjusts itself. I might say the first of these is 
a merchant by knack ; the second, a merchant 
by system ; the third, a merchant on principle. 
That familiar series illustrates for us sufficiently 
a gradation vastly more important, — a grada- 
tion in men's lives, related not to the laws of 
trade, but to the eternal realities. Men and 
women of accomplishment are living for the 
more immediate effect, and trusting the im- 
mediate effort. Men and women of mere sys- 
tem are only repeating what some schoolmaster 



WHAT CAREER? 179 

or some cyclopaedia suggested. But men and 
women of character ! — ah, there we stand with 
those who are not satisfied with time! They 
are not satisfied with to-day's effort or to-day's 
success. Nay, they are not satisfied to know 
that next week this shall be adjusted, or that 
smoothed away. They are not satisfied till 
the word they speak shall ring as true as the 
eternal word, and the house they build be built 
upon the rock eternal. There is the man, there 
is the woman, to whom, in crisis or in calamity, 
friend, neighbor, country turn. There is the 
man, there is the woman, who in new exigency 
rises to the exigency; needs not to be taught 
what to do or how to do it, but does it as 
from "native impulse, elemental force." There 
is the man or woman whose work stands. 
Their names may be forgotten. So are the 
names of almost all martyrs. But their lives 
Live in the higher life of a world renewed ! 



180 WHAT CAREER? 



VII. 
RESPONSIBILITIES OF YOUNG MEN 

An Address delivered in the South Congregational 
Church, Boston. March 22, 1874. 

T HAVE tried, a hundred times, to illustrate 
in this place the duty of young men who 
go out from an old community like ours into 
the new States or the new Territories. In one 
year I parted from four such young men. I 
had with each of them most serious talk as 
to the great duty before them and the noble 
responsibility before them. Frederick Wads- 
worth Loring was one of them. There are 
young men here who well remember him in 
school, — a quick, intense boy, putting ques- 
tions far in advance of his years, while he was 
not easily satisfied with commonplace answers, I 
suppose. I remember seeing him when he was 
but seven years old, so quick, so mature, that I 
despaired of his growing to manhood. But he 



WHAT CAREER? 181 

did grow to manhood, in strong health, too, — 
such a mother had he and such a father, — and 
without the loss of any of the qualities which 
made his childhood admirable. Pure and affec- 
tionate, he passed through college with a lit- 
erary taste and accomplishment hardly equalled 
at his age. He devoted himself to a life of 
letters ; 1 and as correspondent of one or two of 
our leading journals he went with one of the 
Government surveying parties into Arizona and 
California. As he was returning, strong and 
well, the stage coach in which he rode was at- 
tacked by Indians and he was instantly killed. 

Frank Russell Firth, who was not one of 
our number here, but sometimes joined us in 
our afternoon service, the personal friend of 
many to whom I speak, was the first boy I 
knew among the pupils in the Technological 
School. He distinguished himself there as he 
did everywhere, and graduated in their first 

1 Beside articles in different journals, Mr. Loring published 
" Two College Friends," Boston, 1871. He made the plan for 
" Six of One and Half a Dozen of the Other," and contributed 
two poems to it. Many of his poems are in " Poetry of the 
Advocate ; " and a volume of them was published in 1871. 



182 WHAT CAREER? 

class in 1868. He looked round for his place in 
the world as all young- men have to, and as they 
all wonder that they have to ; was never dis- 
couraged, used every moment wisely and well, 
and, when he was hardly of age, was in charge 
of an important railroad line in Kansas and 
Nebraska. On a tour of inspection, he sta- 
tioned himself on the front of the engine of his 
train, that he might note rightly the deflection of 
a bridge which they were to pass. The bridge 
gave way, and Frank Firth was crushed under 
the engine. He lived scarcely long enough to see 
his father, and to bid his friends good-by. 

With him at the moment was Otis Everett 
Allen, also known to many of you. He had 
just graduated at Harvard College, the honored 
son of an honored father, one of my near friends. 
His father died just as he entered college, and 
this boy was loyally entering on life in the manly 
wish to do for his mother and his sister what man 
might do. Between him and Firth there was an 
attachment as of the heroes of romance. He had 
joined him on his perilous post of duty, and 
died iustantly in the same fatal fall. 



WHAT CAREER? 183 

Of these two young men a little biography 
has been published this winter, well worthy the 
careful reading of every boy who hears me, and 
who is old enough to be asking himself what is 
to be his place in life. 1 I have read it myself 
again and again, and I have perhaps learned as 
much from it as from any book, as to the ques- 
tion what our first-rate schools do for the first- 
rate boys who go to them, and what the first-rate 
boys mean to do for the world. I associate these 
three lives and these three deaths, indissolubly 
with the life and death of a fourth young man, 
— much better known to you than any of these 
of whom I have spoken. 

George Gilman Chapin was the first boy whom 
I baptized in the public service of this church. 
I have never forgotten the manly way in which 
he came to me, at his father's side, nor the mod- 
esty and intelligence of his nature, — which 
showed even then, when I supposed he was not 
nine years old, that his interest in the whole 
service was devout and real. It was impossible 

1 " The Young Engineer." A Memoir of Erank Russell 
Firth. With a sketch of the Life of Otis Everett Allen, 
Boston: 1874. 



184 WHAT CAREER? 

not to be interested in such a boy ; and never in 
after life did he fail to make good the bright 
omen of that morning in Whitsuntide. 

He entered Harvard College, and woiked 
there with distinction, but left before graduating. 
He was the practical and efficient secretary of 
our Young People's Society here, ready to lend 
a hand wherever he could be of service. It 
was but a little after Firth and Allen died, that 
I met him in St. Paul in Minnesota, where he 
had established himself, and where everybody 
honored him and respected him. I was with him 
a great deal while I was there. There never 
was a more beautiful instance of the way in 
which a conscientious and highly-trained young 
man could carry to a new community just what 
a new community needs. I was proud of him 
and of all that he was doing. And then, that 
curtain dropped too. A little while after, and 
he died almost as suddenly as the others, from a 
violent typhoid fever. I had seen him, as it 
seemed, for the last time. 

One may well compare such losses in the 
great investment which we are all the time mak- 



WHAT CAREER? 185 

ing, for the building up of our country, with the 
losses of the Civil War. Death did not come 
then more often, more sadly, nor more suddenly, 
when our brave boys went to battle as frankly 
and as willingly as you boys go to a ball or to the 
play. To us who are left, it is no little lesson 
which we learn when such deaths arrest our 
attention, if we can see how important is the 
place which young men hold in social order. 
While such men live, we are looking forward 
to their future. It is when they die, we look 
back and begin to count their worth. 

And I observe, as I know you young men 
observe, that in new communities the value 
of the element of young life is apprehended. 
When you read of the traditions of New Eng- 
land, you will find that such or such a man, the 
founder of a town, heard of a good man at some 
settlement, and rode down there to see if he 
could not secure him. He would know that his 
town could not thrive without men, and so he 
would go down and offer such a homestead, 
such a mowing lot, such a stand for a black- 
smith's shop, if only the man would come. 



186 WHAT CAREER? 

Now, you do not see in exactly the same form 
that necessity now. But none the less is it true 
that at this hour America differs from all the 
rest of the world except Australia, and is for 
real life a better country to grow up in than 
the older parts of the world, because of, I 
think, the larger opportunities given here to 
young men. I am afraid that the young men 
of cities do not recognize this. But I have no 
doubt that it is true. More than once have I 
heard young Americans laugh as they described 
their first interviews with their business corre- 
spondents in London, when they noted the 
extreme surprise with which those elderly men 
found out that they had been corresponding on 
terms of equality with gentlemen who, when 
they came in person, looked, as they would say, 
like boys. Take our country through, there is 
no doubt that we have this great advantage of 
a new country. So long as every man may have 
his own farm by going and taking it, the habit 
or tendency of young men will be to establish 
themselves, instead of living in what they re- 
gard dependence. So the earlier generations 



WHAT CAREER? 187 

here grew up, — and that principle survives. 
George Washington was almost the Nestor of 
the men with whom he advised in the war. 
They are always speaking of his dignit}^ and 
even his venerable aspect. He was forty-three 
when it began. Greene, his only second, was 
thirty-five ; Pickering, his commissary-general, 
was twenty-five ; Hamilton, his favorite aid, was 
twenty when he was appointed to that position, 
and Lafayette was commissioned major-general 
when he was nineteen. Hancock was thirty- 
nine when, as president of Congress, he signed 
the Declaration of Independence. That sort of 
willingness to intrust important duty to men in 
young life has never died out of the country. 
I find that the average age of the representa- 
tives in Congress this year is forty-three years. 
Almost all these men must have served in their 
own States in trusts of importance before they 
came to Congress. I believe the habit is readily 
accounted for by reference to the requisitions on 
any new country. It is the habit of a frontier, 
of new exigencies ; and it has been and is, as I 
believe, to this country, a constant blessing. 



188 WHAT CAREER? 

Let me read you a little passage from Mr. 
Beecher, — which I found since I wrote this 
sermon, in a sermon of his which I wish you 
would all read, — which he calls " Manhood in 
America." He says : — 

" The value of all men, without regard to 
race or condition, is the essential, democratic, 
American idea. The true democratic idea is 
that ' a man 's a man for a' that,' or this or that 
or any thing else. The real democratic Ameri- 
can idea is, not that a man shall be on a level 
with every other man, but that every man shall 
be what God made him, without let or hin- 
drance ; that there shall be no prejudice against 
him if he be high, and that no disgrace shall 
attach to him if he be low ; that he shall have 
supreme possession of what he has and what he 
is ; that he shall have liberty to use his forces 
in any proper direction." 

Now this is as true regarding young men as it 
is of black men or red men, rich men or poor 
men. They shall have liberty to use their 
forces in any proper direction. 

And that habit of the country ought to be 



WHAT CAREER? 189 

recognized by young men who have had advan- 
tages above the average in early training. Such 
men have to ask themselves, What is the place 
of young men in American life ? And I do not 
now put that question for those who go away 
from us into the wilderness. There are not a 
few young men, let us be thankful, who remain 
here at home. It is the opportunities and re- 
sponsibilities which come before them as young 
men, which occupy us to-day. 

Well, they are prompt to say that theirs is 
not the average American lot; that promotion 
here is not rapid ; that it is all as if they were 
in an old country. I believe this is only partly 
true ; but if it were wholly true, it would not 
affect what I have to say of their duties. 

The illustrations I have taken for convenience 
from the Revolution, are illustrations from mili- 
tary or political life. But I should say that the 
first lesson for a young man in Boston to learn, 
would be that, though every man has an impor- 
tant duty to his country, there are a thousand 
ways to discharge that duty without fighting 
for her, or going into the legislature, or trying 



190 WHAT CAREER? 

to do so. We are deceived here by the accidents 
of present history. Probably some man is now 
at work in Boston, studying over some chemical 
process, or some mechanical invention, which 
fifty years hence will be referred to as one of 
the great social improvements of our time ; as 
men speak of the railroad now, or of the inven- 
tion of the sewing-machine, or of Grove's and 
Daniell's sustaining batteries, which made the 
telegraph possible. You and I do not know 
who these men are who are pushing these 
researches. No ! They do not try their ex- 
periments in Faneuil Hall, or on the Common. 
And so, because the people who do try their 
experiments in public, go into print, so that 
you and I read about them night and morning, 
we persuade ourselves, if we are foolish, that 
they are the most important people of our time. 
But not if we are wise — only a little wise. 
For then we know that Robert Fulton did a 
greater work for this country than ever James 
Madison did ; and that Whitney, who was the 
inventor of the cotton gin, did more to establish 
American wealth and the prosperity of the 



WHAT CAREER? 191 

Southern States than all the Southern oiAtors 
and statesmen of his time or of all time put 
together. 

I. The first lesson of any man, I should say, 
must be that he must serve his kind, — and of 
course his country, — but that this is to be in 
the line of his own genius. That phrase is Mr. 
Emerson's ; and if a man do not know what is 
the line of his own genius, as most of us do not 
know, let a man be sure that whatever advan- 
tages he has gained in boyhood anywhere be 
steadily improved upon. For God reigns ; and 
it is as sure as that, that God will call, even to 
the front, every child of his who has any service 
to render. The standing difficulty in the long 
run is not want of places, but want of men. 
You find it very hard to believe this now, when 
you see every advertisement for a clerk answered 
by two hundred applicants. But once go be- 
hind the scenes of practical life, — once hear 
the careful inquiry made by men of large under- 
takings and large results, where they can find 
men of large capacity, or men of absolute hon- 



192 WHAT CAREER? 

esty, or men of hard perseverance, or even men 
who, being well up in their specialty, neither 
drink nor lie nor steal, — and you will under- 
stand what I mean when I say the need, on the 
whole, is the need of men. You will see a man 
is bound in honor to improve the ability he has 
while he can improve it, and to be ready for the 
exigency which it is certain will come. It 
comes sooner to one man than to another. Yes : 
it comes to one man in the demands of a great 
invention. It comes to another man because 
there is a new necessity in literature. It comes 
to another man in some new arrangement of 
government. It comes to another man because 
he proves to be a born apostle of some lesson in 
the Gospel not before wrought out sufficiently. 
It comes to another man in the horrors of civil 
war. It comes in different ways, but to each 
man it comes. I do not say fame comes, nor 
money, nor comfort, nor happiness ; but I say 
that such is the blessing of an eager young 
country like ours, which lives a century in every 
year, that opportunity comes to every man ; 
opportunity to serve mankind and so to serve 



WHAT CAREER? 193 

God ; opportunity to make two blades of grass 
grow somewhere where only one blade grew be- 
fore; opportunity to leave the world a better 
world than he found it. 

II. But woe to the man who is not ready for 
the opportunity when it comes ! Here is the 
pith and point of the parable which describes 
the mysterious coming of the Son of God, and 
tells how some are ready for the wedding, and 
some have their wicks burned dry and their 
lamps empty. In that is just the difference be- 
tween the man who, when there is something to 
do, is eager to try to do it, and the other man, 
who is not all a man, who is not ready, and 
knows he must let the moment go by. The old 
symbolic image of Time had that one forelock 
on the forehead, and one must catch at that or 
he could catch nowhere. And, as we say every 
day, in this country of ours, and in our civiliza- 
tion, " Time moves more quickly than he ever 
did before." That is true. And a man needs 
to be more ready than ever before to be of use 
when his moment does appear, And this is cer- 

9 



194 WHAT CAREER? 

tain, that he will not find his opportunity by 
sitting in the reading-room of a hotel, with his 
feet upon the window-seat, looking out into the 
street, and seeing if the opportunity will ride 
up the street or ride down. I do not think that 
he will find his opportunity by going to ward 
meetings, arranging that William shall be cho- 
sen overseer of the poor, and John be chosen 
school-committee man. I hope he will go to 
the ward caucus, but I hope he will not expect 
to find his opportunity in life there. No ; his 
opportunity to serve the world comes as he im- 
proves his own ability ; and, speaking generally, 
this is to be his ability in the walk of life in 
which he is. 

Is he a manufacturer ? Let him know to the 
bottom the chemistry, the history, and the com- 
bination of the articles he makes. Let him 
some day make them better. Is he a merchant ? 
Let him, at the end of this month, know- 
something about his own line of goods that he 
did not know when the month began. Is he a 
man of letters ? Let him fill up faster than he 
pumps out from the cistern. The man who is 



WHAT CAREER? 195 

always enlarging what is after all a man's real 
capital, need not be afraid to meet the world 
fairly. 

Or it may be, of course, that it is not in a 
man's vocation but in his avocation that he is 
at work, getting ready to be of more service. 
And I have no doubt that every man should 
have a regular avocation as well as a vocation, 
were it only for that physical relief of which 
Brown-Sequard has been teaching us. So 
George Livermore retired every day from his 
business — I suppose I may say at the head of 
the wholesale wool merchants of this city — and 
in his peerless library made himself the leader 
in the lines of delicate and difficult critical 
study which he selected. So Nathaniel Bow- 
ditch retired regularly from his duty in the life 
office, and gave a fixed time to the translation 
of La Place's "Mecanique Celeste." So Ben- 
jamin Franklin retired from the supervision of 
the best printing-office in America, to make the 
electrical experiments and discoveries which in 
that line changed the science of the world. I 
select, as my instances, Boston men, intention- 



J 96 WHAT CAREER? 

ally. From my limited acquaintance here, 
I could name a hundred men who are doin<r 
something of just that sort now, in lines which 
seem to me not less important than these 
which I have named. But I do not think it 
^glit to speak of living men. And what I 
want to do is to try to state the principle upon 
which they are all working. 

They are determined that they will be more 
fit to serve the king next year than they are 
now. That is the whole story. They did not 
" finish their education " when they left the 
High School, or the Dwight School, or Harvard 
College. All of them have found a post-grad- 
uate course that they can work in. For they 
have found out, all of them, that they are chil- 
dren of God, and, as children of God, bound 
to help forward somewhere in God's world. 

I hear with utter satisfaction, then — satisfac- 
tion with which nothing else compares — that 
any two or three of my young friends have 
made a little club together to study chemistry 
or electricity, or Italian or French, or Shaks- 
peare or Chaucer, or butterflies or beetles, or 



WHAT CAREER? 197 

botany or geology (if it be really study) ; to read 
" The Science of Thought," or the " Proven- 
c,al," or the " Laocoon." To know that two or 
three young people have covenanted and agreed 
together that they will be worth more six 
months hence than they are to-day, — it in- 
volves almost every thing so far as they are 
concerned. These studies themselves are not 
to be spoken of as trifling. Limit the subjects 
resolutely, bind each other to loyal work, and 
you have opportunities for really important 
results, leading farther than you know, or I. 
But it is not for mere results that I am anxious, 
or am forelooking. It is for those who form 
such clubs that I speak. They gain the mutual 
help, which is so much. There is so much less 
danger that they will take the hand from the 
plough. And when you really see, in a fair in- 
stance, that such a combination has been bravely 
and faithfully maintained, you may almost say 
that you are sure that God will find there faith- 
ful servants ; and that, when the bell strikes, 
there will be among them those who can do the 
duty and bear the burden which in his counsels 
are imposed. 



198 WHAT CAREER? 

Nor does this which I am saying require or 
imply that the man I am talking about is to give 
himself up to books after a day's work in some 
confined employment. He may do that, or he 
may not. The point is simply that somehow 
and somewhere he is to enlarge his working 
power. One man does this, as Frederic Turell 
Gray did it, by devoting his off-time to the poor 
around him, — a study which with him went so 
far, that from the movements set on foot by him 
and others like him grew up the whole system 
of the Benevolent Fraternity of churches here. 
As he and those men saw that system, and 
looked forward to its development, it looked 
forward to a real spiritual oversight of this 
whole city, — of every exile in it, every stranger, 
every lonely man or woman. 

That is the work of a young publisher, who 
took this as his avocation. Some men do it in 
perfecting a new invention. Some men do it 
by making life tolerable to exiles who have no 
friend but those who seek them half way. 
%t How in the world did a busy man like you 
learn the Hungarian language?" said I to a 



WHAT CAREER? 199 

partner in one of the largest business firms in 
the world. " Oh," said he, " there was a poor 
dog of a Hungarian officer, who was starving in 
an attic, and I found it comforted him to have 
me come and talk with him; and it ended in 
our reading Hamlet together in the Hungarian 
version." So, when the bell struck, that man 
was ready to use the language which by what 
you please to call accident he had learned. I 
know a man who learned the Spanish language 
from the barber who shaved him ; and he told 
me that the knowledge was, as it proved, of 
essential service to him and to other men in all 
his after life. A young lady came to me once, 
complaining of the sad want of good society in 
the manufacturing town of forty thousand 
people in which she lived. I told her she did 
not know where to seek it. I lived in another 
manufacturing town of half that population ; 
and I told her that the only nobleman I had 
ever known, of absolutely blue blood of sixteen 
quarterings, — a man whose ancestors were 
noble before Columbus guessed at America, — 
was a man whose acquaintance I made when he 



200 WHAT CAREER? 

came to my front door and asked if I had an old 
coat that I could give him. An accomplished 
gentleman he was, too, — temperate, honorable, 
and manly. But he was an exile, and in over- 
work for his daily bread he had become blind. 
Take these as instances of the ways wholly out- 
side of closet study, in which a man may be 
gaining new resources and growing more ready 
for the duty to which it may please God to call 
him. 

And of such detail I must say no more. My 
object, indeed, was not to speak of detail. 
My object was to warn young men against the 
mistake which the French and English books 
are a little apt to inculcate, — the mistake of 
supposing that it is of no great consequence 
where or how a man spends the years from 
twenty to thirty. It is of infinite consequence. 
To us in America, in every step in social order, 
in every physical impediment, in every political 
revolution, it is of visible, palpable importance, 
if a man will only put out his fingers to feel, or 
open his eyes to see. We live among revolu- 
tions. Tremendous things are happening all 



WHAT CAREER? 201 

the time. It is the Boston fire. It is the Sep- 
tember panic. It is the destruction of Chicago. 
It is the Civil Wai. It is an inundation in 
Louisiana. Or, such convulsions apart, we live 
a life of surprises. A city doubles its popu- 
lation in a dozen years. The whole line of its 
business changes in twenty. A new current 
of emigration sets in here. A new line of ex- 
ports opens there. All this means that America, 
while it is America and because it is America, 
needs all the time new men and young men. 
It needs that these young men shall be ready. 

And that readiness is not to be the alacrity 
of the fencing-master, the deportment of the 
manners-master, the selfishness of a Pelham, or 
the etiquette of a Chesterfield. It is to be the 
manliness of a man. Here is one more child 
of God. He is a child who, when he became old 
enough to see and to hear, opened his eyes that 
they might see, his ears that they might hear, — 
yes, and his heart that it might understand. 
Of his own manly free will he determined to be 
"partaker of the divine nature." That is some- 
thing more than to be a rival of Chesterfield, or 
9* 



202 WHAT CAREER? 

a disciple of Turveydrop. To be a "partaker 
of the divine nature ;" to be as true as God 
himself; as loving to those in need as God's 
Son well beloved ; as ready to serve as the loyal 
child should be to the Father who never fails. 
This child of God thus determining, thanks 
God first, last, always, that he has placed him 
in a society where each can lend a hand, and 
where no man gainsays his endeavor. Proud of 
the ancestry who have given to him such privi- 
leges, he is determined that to his children these 
privileges shall go down. Then to the exiles 
from other lands, who did not inherit such 
privileges, he is determined that, in their own 
despite, they shall transmit them to their chil- 
dren ! Yes ; and he sees and knows and under- 
stands where is the central life of all such 
endeavor. That life came into the world when 
the great password was spoken : " Bear ye one 
another's burdens." That life began for the 
world when, in the greatest epoch of its life, 
the world found that it was one world, — of one 
heart and of one soul. It began when men be- 
gan to live each for each in infinite attraction, 



WHAT CAREER? 203 

and secluded themselves no longer each alone 
in beastly separation. He knows the law of 
this new life. He knows the history of this 
new life. And to the reunited world, the 
world redeemed in it ; to the universal Church, 
the kingdom of its God — he consecrates his life 
and his endeavor : life and endeavor never so 
noble or so beautiful as when they are offered 
by the young knight just as he is admitted 
to knighthood, and laid, as the first fruits of 
his manhood, upon the altar of his God ! 



204 WHAT CAREER? 

VIII. 

STUDY OUTSIDE SCHOOL. 

T HAVE just returned from a visit to Antioch 
College, — an institution established by the 
Unitarian church, near a quarter of a century 
ago, for the higher education of the young peo- 
ple of this country, — especially in the Middle 
States. I have for some years held the post of 
chairman of the Trustees of the funds collected 
for this purpose. It is, therefore, my official 
duty to attend once a year at its commence- 
ment. 

There is something very interesting, pathetic 
indeed, in the start upon life thus made at such 
a time by high-strung, well-taught young peo- 
ple, — quite sure that they are to conquer the 
world ; and there is something very sweet in 
the sympathy and confidence with which the 
hopes of the graduates are regarded by those 
behind them. 



WHAT CAREER? 205 

Our class-day and college commencement, 
and the closing exercises of all the schools, are 
going to show us just the same thing here. 
And so I am going to talk to you young peo- 
ple about the use to be made of freedom from 
school and college, — in continuing the line of 
life and study into which school or college have 
introduced you. 

For I suppose there is no time when a boy 
or girl feels the worth of school-training as they 
do at the moment when they leave it for ever. 
When the chance is over, you feel that you could 
have done more with it. When you see how 
others have improved, you wonder why you did 
not take the same steps as they. You pack up 
the elementary school books, to say, " Some- 
time and somehow, I will know more of these 
things than the elements." Nay, even if you 
look back with relief on the old restrictions 
which are done with for ever, duly grateful 
that for you study-bells and regular atten- 
dance in the class-room exist no longer, that 
sense of freedom suggests the resolve that the 
free man shall use time to more advantage than 



206 WHAT CAREER? 

the boy found when he was thus hampered and 
crippled by chains and rules. 

Well, I begin with saying to my young friends 
that the plans they form now of continuing 
school studies on a more generous plan, less 
cramped and more in unison with their tastes, 
are wholly justified in the resources open to 
them here, and in the omnipotence of their 
period of life, if only they will hold to the hope 
or plan with tolerable loyalty. Other dreams 
of youth may be fallible and foolish, but the 
determination of the boy or girl of seventeen to 
be through life a scholar is in no sense fallible 
or foolish in the conditions of society among us. 
No matter who or what that boy or girl may be. 
Printer's boy like Franklin ; bound girl in a 
log-cabin like Mrs. Farnham ; merchant's clerk 
like George Livermore ; shoemaker's apprentice 
like Henry Wilson or Roger Sherman, — any one 
who determines at seventeen to use an hour each 
morning and an hour each night in systematic 
study, will come out at the end of twenty years 
among the systematic scholars of the land. 
They are not a large class, but they are a class 



WHAT CAREER? 207 

of men and women happy, contented, and use- 
ful ; happy and contented because useful, and 
useful because happy and contented. 

Now I am going to speak specially, to-day, 
not of general training for life, but simply of 
these visions and hopes of school boys and 
school girls for keeping up mental training ; I 
am going to speak of what I believe the best 
methods and the necessary cautions, as far as 
I can, from my own experience. 

I. First of all, I am speaking of and I sup- 
pose myself speaking to young people who 
have regular work to do in this world besides 
keeping up the studies of school. My first 
business is to tell them that their position has 
distinct advantages, and that their disadvantages 
for study do not overweigh the advantages, — as 
I hope I shall show. I have, therefore, sug- 
gested that I do not expect them to give more 
than twelve hours a week, or two hours a day, 
to the regular study which I suppose them to be 
undertaking. This is more time than the average 
professional man — doctor, lawyer, clergyman, 



208 WHAT CAREER? 

or civil engineer — gives to general systematic 
study. Any such man would be glad indeed if 
anybody would guarantee him two hours for 
systematic work in general study, aside from 
what he has to give to the bread-and-butter 
work, or hand-to-mouth work, in which he takes 
up to-day the particular information which he 
needs for the particular requisition of to-morrow. 
Two hours a day of systematic study, if you 
can get it, is all that any men, but the two or 
three who are exceptionally favored, pretend to 
use for it as the year goes round. 

II. With regard to the subject of reading or 
study, you begin now to find the advantage of 
leaving school. School lays a foundation. From 
the nature of the case it has to lay the same 
foundation for you all. One of the wisest and 
wittiest women of our time once put it thus 
to me : — 

" At school we are taught a little botany, and 
a little physiology, and a little chemistry, and a 
little natural philosophy ; a little of metaphysics, 
and a little of morals, and a little of history ; a 



WHAT CAKEERV 209 

little Latin, a little French, a little Italian, a 
little German and Greek; a little arithmetic, 
a little algebra, a little geometry, — at school 
we are taught a little of every thing." True 
enough ; that is precisely what the higher 
schools are for. They are to give the scholar 
a taste. Then let him go forward if he will, 
where he will, and as he will. Two or three of 
the last years of school have not been badly 
spent, if they have given such a series of 
glimpses round the panorama that you can 
wisely choose which direction you will take for 
your own journey. 

Now you have the luxury of making your 
own choice. And now you are to study, — not 
ten things at a time, but one thing. And here 
is one of the places where your taste, your 
fancy, — what you like, — may come in. The 
rule for gratifying one's tastes in life is exact 
here. You must do the duty next your hand, 
that is certain ; but of ten duties next your 
hand you are to choose that which you do most 
happily, which suits you best, or for which 
God fitted you. So long as you were at school, 



210 WHAT CAREER? 

it was your duty to do what the schoolmaster 
told you to do. Now, of this realm of reading 
or study, it is your duty to choose first that 
which you need most or like best. And now 
you are to drop the effort to follow up ten lines 
of study at a time. Now you are to select, for 
your two hours daily, some one out of the ten. 

III. And you are to choose now, no longer as 
one plajdng with the elements, but as a student 
who is going to do this thing thoroughly. 

Do not ask me to choose for you. I do not 
know. I cannot tell either what your tastes 
are or your duties. It may be that your father 
is an importer of drugs, that it is interesting 
and valuable for you and for him to know of all 
manner of plants, from the cedar of Lebanon to 
the hyssop under the wall. In that case, I 
should think you would study botany ; and 
study it, not satisfied with pulling a violet to 
pieces to count its stamens, but so to study it as 
to learn the laws of growth, the territorial divi- 
sion of genera and species, the relations of cli- 
mate to growth, and again of vegetation to 



WHAT CAREER V 211 

climate. I should think you would like to 
enter into the heart and marrow of your father's 
daily duty, and of what you are to hear of 
every day of your life. 

Or you may be touched by all this centennial 
clamor, Fourth of July jubilation, Old South 
preservation and the rest. I should think you 
would like to know something of the real his- 
tory of your country beneath the school-book 
gloss ; what manner of men Hancock and the 
Adamses, Quincy, Ward, Warren, and the other 
Massachusetts heroes really were ; what Jeffer- 
son, and Paine, and Dickinson, and Schuyler, 
and Livingston were. I should think you 
would like to study a hundred years ago in the 
writings of a hundred years ago ; in the words, 
I mean, of the actors, and their times. 

Or in this daily talk of politics and social 
matters deeper than politics, I should think 
that a boy or girl of seventeen leaving school, 
might resolve boldly to understand some of the 
principles at the bottom of questions of hard 
money and soft money, of free trade and pro- 
tection ; of grangers, and eight-hour laws, and 



212 WHAT CAREER? 

trade-unions. This would be to study sociology 
and political economy. 

Or I can understand how and why such a 
boy or girl, not satisfied with the smattering 
of Latin, or German, or French he has brought 
from school, should resolve to go beyond the 
mere elements of the language into the luxury 
of the literature. Nor can any moment be more 
delightful than the moment when such a person 
at last launches loose from the ties which have 
bound him to the dictionary, and starts over the 
ocean of a great literature, unfettered and free, 
conquering a new world by the magic of a new 
language. 

Choose for yourself, you who have a right to 
choose now ; but choose one thing first, and do 
not add the second till you are certain about 
the one. Do not let John persuade you to 
study French, and Max to study German, and 
Henry to study astronomy, and Walter to study 
chemistry. Do not think because you are free 
you can do every thing. You are to do one 
tiling at a time, if you do it well. One thing 
well done, of course you may take another. 



WHAT CAREER? 213 

French well mastered, take your French to 
study chemistry. Chemical analysis well un- 
derstood, use it in studying mineralogy. The 
mathematics of mineralogy well compassed, 
use it in your studies of geology. But do not 
be trying to compass all these things at once 
and together. 

On the other hand, if you can find a com- 
panion to do your work with you, two of you 
together will achieve each twice as much as 
one would do alone. I do not lay much stress 
on the teacher. A great teacher, who will 
inspire you, is certainly a great blessing. But 
wonders can be done in the way of study by 
resolute learners who have no teachers. I do 
hope, for each of you, that you will have com- 
panionship and sympathy. 

IV. And, now, one word as to the first prac- 
tical difficulty you are going to meet ; or, shall 
I say, the first enemy in your way. I have sup- 
posed that, from your household and social 
duties, you girls are going to win two hours 
for study ; and that, from your daily work at 



214 WHAT CAREER? 

the store, you boys are going to win two. 
The first temptation will be to give those two 
hours to novel-reading, to the magazines, or at 
the least to the newspapers and reviews, on the 
ground that they are improving. What are you 
to do about these ? 

Well, I have profited too much by novels to 
say hard things about them. I recognize abso- 
lutely the truth that the finest work of the 
literature of our time has taken that form. I 
think there is no English book of the last twenty 
years which has a better chance with posterity 
than George Eliot's novels. But when I see 
the trash which boys and girls have in their 
hands in the street cars ; when I see what peo- 
ple buy and devour in travelling ; when I see 
what lies about on people's tables and seashore 
piazzas and mountain hotels, — I know that 
I must speak of the worst temptation for 
young people let loose from school. There is 
no such enemy to firm and intelligent study as 
the unrestricted habit of devouring novels. Hold 
that in check, therefore, from the beginning. 
From the beginning, determine that for every 



WHAT CAREER? 215 

hour of novel reading in a day, you will read 
for an hour something of some worth beside the 
excitement of the hour. The old ladies who 
sent to the Dorchester Public Library a half 
century ago, used to send for " a sermon-beok 
and another book," leaving to the librarian to 
choose. I wish their granddaughters to-day, 
when they send for a novel, would send for 
" another book " as well, and never would take 
novel number two till the "other book" had 
been well and wisely digested. The analogy of 
sugar-plums is perfect. Woe to the boy or girl 
who eats candy all the time ; because a little 
sweetmeat has its place — and a very good 
place. The solid meals of the day have their 
place, too. And this is all that I will say. But 
I forewarn you that, when at New Year you are 
looking back on the resolutions about your 
studies which you have not kept, the failure 
will be, not that you have read nothing, but that 
what you have read was not worth the reading. 

V. Now in this whole affair the key is this : 
your study is not for so poor an object as to 



216 WHAT CAREER? 

please yourself ; it is, in the end, that you may 
please those you love. Yes, I have a great re- 
spect for the girl who studied chemistry so that 
she might the better make the sugar-plums for 
her younger brothers and sisters. I think her 
chemistry was God-favored ; and I have no 
doubt that the spirit in which she conceived her 
task lifted her up all along and carried her 
bravely through. To be enlarging steadily the 
mental power God gave when you were born, 
that you may carry out his purpose the more 
steadily, may bring this world nearer heaven, — 
that is your object when you choose this or that 
direction for your reading. Or, if you choose 
modestly to define it in less terms, and to say 
you would be a better companion to your moth- 
er, or would serve better your little brothers in 
their studies, I will accept that definition. I 
only say that that means the same thing. If, in 
the schools, the poor vision of culture for the sake 
of culture has been haunting you, let us thank 
God that you are out of the schools ; and let us 
pray to him that life, with its duties and dan- 
gers, may lay that ghost, and lay him ioi ever, 



WHAT CAREER? 217 

/ 

I hate the word " Culture," it has been so pa- 
raded and discussed, — the theme of platforms 
and of lectures that meant nothing. It has 
been so mixed up with conceit and selfishness 
that I had rather you told me any friend of 
mine was a woman of pleasure, or a woman of 
fashion, than that she was a person of "cult- 
ure," as that phrase is commonly applied. An 
indignant "Western writer the other day said 
that when the Chinook Indians wished to stamp 
a wordy pretender with their lowest contempt; 
when they wanted to speak of the maximum of 
brag with the minimum of performance ; when, 
for instance, they would describe a young chief 
who had never been on the war-trail, and had 
never looked an enemy in the face, but who 
was perfect in his war-paint, carried weapons 
of the most elaborate make, and wore more 
feathers than any warrior of them all, — they 
described this man by the name, " Boston 
Cultus." 

Well, you and I know what that satire 
means, and we know where it is deserved. It 
is deserved by the men who say the country is 
10 



218 WHAT CAREER? 

going to the clogs, and who never give a vote to 
save it. It is deserved by the men who found 
fault with every movement of the war, and 
never carried a musket. It is deserved by the 
men who say the sharpest and smartest things 
against universal suffrage, and yet never lifted 
a finger to welcome an emigrant, nor spent 
a dollar to teach a negro. It is deserved by the 
men who say the West is a horde of barbarians, 
who yet never travelled farther west than the 
Saratoga race-courses, nor looked face to face at 
the pure democracy of a healthy Western town. 
Such satire is fairly enough deserved in its 
place ; but it has no voice against the culture 
which makes of Boston a university ; which fills 
it every winter with young men and women from 
every State this side of the Pacific, who have 
come here to study music, or language, or paint- 
ing, or philosophy, or physical science, in 
schools which offer them training most broadly 
and most cheaply. And for you and me the 
lesson, not of such easy satire only, but of 
every living word of a loving God, is that what 
we read or study is to be that which sooner or 



WHAT CAREER? 219 

later will make us better soldiers in his service. 
Wide is the sweep of that service, indeed. It 
may be to stand faithful among the faithless, 
as Abdiel. It may be to go to tell the message 
of his love and wisdom to the ignorant, like 
Gabriel. It may be to be a guardian of the 
weak, like Raphael. It may be to stand 
guard at the gate and keep away disease and 
pestilence, hatred and malice, from those we 
love, to detect falsehood by its own ugliness, 
and to know truth of our own nature, like 
Ithuriel. It may be to be " God's eyes, that 
run through all the heavens, or down to the 
earth bear his swift errands," as was the service 
of Uriel. It may be to crush and destroy his 
enemies, as was the work of Michael. Or it may 
be that we are of that chorus and company of 
all saints who also serve although they stand and 
wait. Be it where he will, we are in his service. 
Choose what line we will, we choose to build 
up his kingdom. We are on the side of God, 
and throw in our lot and our endeavor with the 
progress and purity of his world. Do not let 
any sceptic pull you down from that high ambi- 



220 WHAT CAREER? 

tion. Do not let any sneer make you afraid to 
assert a claim so grand. Your voice, your pen, 
your kindness, your patience, your sympathy, 
and your help, shall be more able and more — 
as you rightly use and train these talents which 
are his gift — to open blind eyes and deaf ears, 
to make homes happy, and to make deserts 
smile. You live for him and to his glory. 



WHAT CAREER? 221 

IX. 

THE TRAINING OF MEN. 

"^T 7 HEN I was little more than a boy, I was* 
presented to Mr. John Tyler, then Presi- 
dent of the United States, and had the advan- 
tage of a few minutes' conversation with him. 
He advised me as to my route in a journey I 
proposed into Virginia. He said I should not 
find the aspect of a large population, to which 
I was used in Massachusetts, — that their pecu- 
liar institutions withdrew the laboring people 
and their homes to a distance from the high- 
ways. " Indeed," said he, " you will not see so 
much of the evidences of material wealth in any 
part of Virginia. But, if you will go into the 
valley of the James 1 River, you will see the 
great turning-places of our history. You will 
see Jamestown, where American history began ; 
you will see Yorktown, where colonial history 
ended ; you will see the birth-place or the resi* 

1 Pronounced " Jeeras," by Old Virginia. 



222 WHAT CAREER? 

dence of Patrick Henry, of Washington, of Jef- 
ferson, and of Madison. In such associations 
as these, you will be less curious about traces of 
ph} r sical prosperity." 

I then learned, boy as I was, a lesson which I 
have never forgotten. For President Tyler was 
supposed to be susceptible to compliment, and I 
was young enough to be in the mood to humor 
him. I bent forward to quote the beautiful lines 
by which Mrs. Barbauld truly describes the great- 
ness of England. 

I was on the point of saying, — 

" Man is the nobler growth your realms supply," 

when it occurred to me, just in time, that at that 
moment the principal trade of Virginia was the 
exportation of men to the Louisiana sugar plan- 
tations. She did not really care quite so much, 
just then, for Washington or for Jefferson, as for 
the growth of men for other purposes. The 
men who were brought up on her corn were sold 
as soon as they were men for the labor of Louisi- 
ana. The quotation, therefore, — 

" Man is the nobler growth your realms supply," 



WHAT CAREER? 223 

was fatally and sadly true, in a sense other than 
Mrs. Barbauld's ; and, at the same moment, it 
was a fatal exposition of the cause of that pov- 
erty in resources which the President was ac- 
knowledging. I bit my lip, said nothing, which 
is always wise, and the President passed on to 
some other views of Virginian greatness. I 
meanwhile had learned, so that I have remem- 
bered it since, the lesson of the folly and vanity 
of compliment. 

That was thirty-three years ago, — a third of 
a century ago. In that time, I have travelled 
often in Virginia, and every time when I have 
gone there, I have come home haunted with the 
remembrance of this first conversation I ever had 
with a President of the United States ; and with 
the lesson of the value of men in the world, 
which, though neither of us meant it, was con- 
veyed in it. I have now come home from 
Louisiana and Texas, from the deserts of the 
Indian Territory and Kansas, saying just the 
same thing, — 

" Man is the nobler growth our realms supply ; " 

and convinced again, and more convinced than 



224 WHAT CAREER? 

ever, that all schemes of reconstruction are hope- 
less, all victories of armies idle, all natural lux- 
ury of climate a snare, and all mineral wealth 
a delusion, unless you have men to use the vic- 
tories, men to enforce the laws, men to enjoy the 
climate, men to subdue the earth. Again I 
learn the eternal lesson of the vanity of things, 
where there is no master spirit to control things. 
It is the lesson of the nothingness of Nature, 
unless the child of God — • unless man — takes 
Nature in hand to tame her. 

One sits at home in our dismal climate, one 
sees the hand-to-mouth work of our farming, — 
crops of granite and of ice for its only exports, 
— and one sighs for richer fields and warmer 
skies. Then one travels to see those fields and 
to enjoy those skies ; and one hears the word 
that God said to Adam in the beginning, that 
he bade him subdue the earth. One learns that 
the earth is nothing unless you have the men ; 
and one asks how and when and where the 
noblest man — the child of God most godly — is 
to be found and is to be trained. 

When one finds that, he finds how the wilder- 



WHAT CAREER? 225 

ness is to be vanquished and the desert blossom 
with the rose. He sees, in fact, what Isaiah 
saw in prophetic rapture, that the desert re- 
joices and the wilderness is glad, only when 
they see the coming of the true Son of Man. 

I. This is, of course, true, though you speak 
of dollars and cents, of mere material wealth. 
I need not show that land alone is not worth a 
penny, — not though it were underlaid with gold, 
not though it bore corn and olive and vine, — 
until you can put men upon it to take its treas- 
ure in hand. True, the Old World people, when 
they come over here, forget this, land at home 
seems so precious. They wonder how we can 
afford to give away homesteads to settlers, if 
they will only please to take them. The lesson 
has been a lesson which our Southern friends 
have found it hard to learn, — that the poorest 
land, if it had a thousand people to the square 
mile, was worth a thousand times as much as 
one of their plantation baronies without inhabi- 
tants. It is rather a curious feature of the early 
colonization of all our States, that the unwel- 
10* 



226 WHAT CAREER? 

come lesson had to be taught to all capitalists 
that land alone is as valueless as water alone, — 
an acre of desert land as an acre of desert water. 
It took long to persuade an earl or a duke, to 
whom an English king had given a principality 
as large on the map as England, that really his 
master had given him nothing. It took long to 
persuade the Virginia Company, to whom King 
James gave half a continent, and the Plymouth 
Company, to whom he gave the other half, that 
in truth he had given them nothing. A gen- 
eration, more or less, taught them, as the same 
length of time taught the barons and the dukes, 
generally at some cost, that they would be wise 
to part, when they could, from the royal gift, and 
bestow it on any one who would take it. Crozat 
and Law learned the same lesson in Louisiana. 
With such experience, whoever looks an instant 
at the causes of wealth sees why this is so. 
Robinson Crusoe's lump of gold had no value, 
because on his island there were no men who 
had need of gold. And so the worth of any 
spot on the world's surface in the market de- 
pends on its ease of access, — on the use, that is, 



WHAT CAREER? 227 

which can be made of it in the enterprises of 
men. 

II. That is mere matter of the exchange. 
What interests us in our purposes is the quality 
of the men who hold any territory. How much 
of manliness is there in them? Or, speaking 
more simply, how godly are these men ? How 
much is there in them of the spirit of the creat- 
ing God ? Tossed on different surges of the 
same ocean, at the same moment of the year 
1620, were two ships working westward, — one 
to Virginia and one to New England. They 
met the same gales ; they rejoiced in the same 
east winds ; they reached their harbors nearly 
at the same time; a hundred people in each 
perhaps. Yes, but what is the quality of these 
men? How much muscle? how much brain? 
how much soul ? To ask the last question is to 
ask, How much of God is there ? how near to 
God are they ? how high in the grade of men ? 

The vessel on the Southern yoyage has a 
hundred negroes from the Guinea coast. They 
have been stolen by Dutch adventurers. They 



228 WHAT CAREER? 

are brought to do field-labor beneath the lash on 
this James River. They have learned nothing ; 
they know nothing. As far as you can ever say 
it of men, they believe nothing, remember noth 
ing, and hope for nothing. They hardly know 
there was a past. They hardly look forward to 
a future. The other vessel, the "Mayflower," 
has a hundred English Independents, culled 
from the best wheat of England, and trained 
for twelve years in the midst of the best wisdom 
of Holland. They are men who for an idea 
have left home. For right and for God they 
have come into the wilderness. They are men 
who live for faith, for hope, and for love. I 
need not make any calculation of the worth of 
these two cargoes. I would leave it to any man 
who is used to the work of colonization. I will 
take the most cold-blooded estimate of any bro- 
ker of land. Which will be worth the most in 
the market, when ten years have gone by, — the 
sands of Plymouth, with what are left of the hun- 
dred God-fearing men and women, or the rich 
bottom-land of Virginia, beneath the compelled 
laboi of what are left of the hundred faithless 
slaves ? 



WHAT CAREER? 229 

There is a distinction, as we see at the very 
outset, in the quality of men. 

III. So we come back to our real question, 
How are such godly men to be found and 
trained, — how, when, and where ? I have less 
and less faith in that convenient modern theory 
which makes out the great gifts of godli- 
ness and manliness to be the native fruits of 
certain climates, or of particular physical geo- 
graphy. I do not see that the facts sustain the 
theory. For, in truth, very diverse facts are 
called upon, as the theory happens to require. 
If the inquiry is about Peter the Great, who 
raised a barbarous State to be a first-rate power, 
you are told that northern climates develop 
strong characters, and make royal men. But if 
the royal man, who has made a small State into 
a great one, happens to be Solomon in Palestine 
or Pericles in Athens, you are told that the lux- 
ury of the climate of the Mediterranean gave 
fine chance for exquisite physical development, 
and for the mental and moral gifts which to 
physical development belong. We in New Eng- 



230 WHAT CAREER? 

land hear a good deal of the simple and pure 
virtues of the Northern races, because we hap- 
pen to belong to those races, and do not dislike 
to paint our own pictures. Of course, our posi- 
tion saves us from many temptations ; but what 
is the worth of virtue which has never been 
tempted? When I think of such men as Tous- 
saint, born in San Domingo ; as Napoleon, born 
in Corsica ; as Washington, born in Virginia ; as 
Dante, born in Florence ; as Alfred, born in Eng- 
land ; as Epictetus, born in Phrygia ; as Socrates, 
born in Athens ; as David, born in Bethlehem, 
— I see that moral goodness or mental greatness 
belongs to no one climate or set of circumstances 
more than another. And, if you speak of spe- 
cial gifts, no man who has seen Mr. Webster 
tame an unwilling audience and carry it along 
with him, and has read how Demosthenes did 
the same thing with the mob of Athens, will 
believe that the gift of eloquence is a special 
gift, either of the mountains of New Hampshire 
or of the ripples of the waves of the jEgean 
shore. 

How, when, and where, then, are we to find 



WHAT CAKEER? 231 

the mOfeC manly men, which is to say, the most 
godly? We must not look in a particular soil 
for them, as if they were ground-nuts or turnips, 
nor along a particular isothermal line, as if they 
were palm-trees or pines. Jesus Christ struck 
the key-note of the answer, when he reversed 
all superficial speculations by saying, " The last 
shall be first ; " " He that is least among you 
shall be greatest ; " " He that humbleth himself 
shall be exalted ; " " He that is least in the king- 
dom of heaven shall be greater than the prophet 
who has the most popular surrounding, or than 
the ascetic whose fasting is most severe." In 
all such announcements, sometimes abruptly 
paradoxical in form, the central truth is pro- 
claimed that manliness is a moral quality, — that 
it belongs to spirit and the empire of spirit. It 
is not a matter of mental fibre or physical fibre. 
It is not to be contracted for, as you contract for 
the staple of the wool of a sheep, for the flesh 
on the thigh of an ox, for the speed or bottom 
of a horse, when you go to the breeder of those 
animals to tell him what you want, or when he 
undertakes to supply you. " All these things 



232 WHAT CAREER? 

ye should have done, but not have left the 
others undone." 

The physiological discoveries of recent times 
have done a good deal to help us in these ques- 
tions. At the least, they have confirmed the best 
instructions of the prophets and other spiritual 
teachers, whose boldest statements are now con- 
firmed even by the anatomists. I said this was 
not a matter of mental fibre or physical fibre. 
Now, it is not long since the impression was 
very widely diffused, that mental training had 
the most intimate relation with moral force. 
People really thought that you could argue or 
prove your way into heaven. Because we do 
not see the mind, people have been very fond of 
speaking as if mere mental processes, — such as 
memory, imagination, and reasoning, — were in 
themselves somehow elements of original power 
and sources of real life. People have talked as 
if Lord Byron or La Place or Goethe or Napo- 
leon, because of their wonderful mental faculty, 
had any more original power, any more chance 
for moral insight and moral victory, any more 
sway of circumstance. No one would have 



WHAT CAREER? 233 

said this of a giant, or a man of strong muscle, 
— of Milo of Crotona, or of some seven-foot 
Kentuckian. But men did say it of mental 
giants and persons of strong reasoning faculty. 
They spoke as if such brilliant mental marvels 
had a better chance of knowing God and doing 
his will than some stupid old black man, who 
could neither read nor write nor reckon. All 
this folly ought to be set aside by recent dis- 
coveries as to the nature of mere mental effort. 
For it proves now that an effort of memory or 
a train of argument takes up bodily fibre, tires 
out and wears down the body just as much as 
running a race does, or striking at a ball. It is 
made almost certain, from mere physical obser- 
vations, that the merely intellectual efforts be- 
long with feats of bodily strength. The mere 
mind and the mere body are to be ranked 
together. 

All this observation makes simpler and more 
interesting all the set of studies, which show 
how the man himself, the living soul, is to con* 
trol the mind and to control the body. The 
theory of the Dark Ages and of the Fathers of 



234 WHAT CAREER? 

the Reformation is exploded, which taught that 
the man would gain vital power if he only 
understood about the Vicarious Atonement, or 
if he committed to memory a theory of the Fall 
of Man, or if he said that he believed one or 
another theory of the Trinity. The training 
of the mind and the training of the body must 
henceforth be regarded as on the same plane. 
And all men who believe there is a soul, espe- 
cially all who believe that this soul survives the 
body, will see that the man gains in strength in 
proportion as the soul of man subdues body and 
mind together. And it is made certain, for such 
questions as we are trying to solve, that if we 
only have manhood enough in the men and 
womanhood enough in the women, they will 
control body and mind, whatever climate or soil, 
latitude or longitude. They will become mon- 
archs even of the wilderness, and will compel it 
to blossom. 

Force inheres in moral quality. Mind and 
body are its tools, and nothing more. Now, 
because moral quality, and the finest moral 
quality, may appear anywhere among the chil- 



WHAT CAREER? 235 

dren of God, — may appear in " Uncle Tom," in 
his cabin ; in Jeanne of Orleans, in her peasant's 
hut ; in Grace Darling, on the lonely storm-beat 
shore, — you must arrange the steps of promo- 
tion for everybody, you must arrange your uni- 
versal training for everybody, keep watch and 
ward that every child of God may have a chance 
as good as the best. When the lily of the field 
germinates, there must be no heavy slate-stone 
over its head to throw it back into darkness for 
ever, while tares and whiteweed are flaunting 
all around in sunlight and air, and scattering 
their pestilent seeds for the destruction of future 
harvests. This is the distinct and central rule 
of Christian civilization. Give every child of 
God the best that you can give in the way of 
training; let him share equally with all the oth- 
ers. No matter if he come rushing in at the 
eleventh hour. If he have neglected, or if oth- 
ers of his race have neglected, all the golden 
opportunities of dawn or glorious noon, still, for 
all that, do you, who are only stewards of God's 
bounty, give him the same penny that you give 
to those who have wrought with you all day. 



236 WHAT CAREER? 

For he is God's child as well as they, and so has 
the unstinted, untaxed, uncompared treasure 
of the very fulness of God's love. This is the 
meaning of that parable. 

And in this fundamental axiom of the life of 
a republic, that it must keep open to the top 
every line of promotion, is that remark confuted 
which we sometimes hear in whispers, that pop- 
ular education is to be limited to the elements 
of learning only. People say in whispers what 
they are not so apt to say when they are candi- 
dates, that the State should only pay for reading, 
writing, and arithmetic. It should not pay, they 
say, for Greek and Latin, for history, and a 
knowledge of fine art, because these are for the 
few who can pay for them, while the elements 
only are for all. This heresy starts on the mis- 
take that it is for their own good only that the 
State trains them. In truth, the State trains 
them for her own good, first of all. Then the 
heresy supposes that the few who can pay for the 
higher training are the few who need it. But 
no man can tell where or in what class of society 
Jenny Lind is to be born, or Florence Nightin- 



WHAT CAREER? ^37 

gale, or Robert Fulton, or Abraham Lincoln ; and 
we must not risk the loss of any one who would 
help the world by withholding at the right time 
the right culture. For the State's sake, we must 
offer it open-handed to them all. 

But there need be no real danger from this 
heresy, nor from any of the short-sighted here- 
sies of the old schools of politics, which were 
bred in castes or classes. If we can bear in 
mind always that the whole object of the State, 
— of constitutions of government, of systems 
of education, — is to make men and women who 
deserve those names, all our questions will be 
answered easily. All law, all policies, must be 
subordinated to this training of the citizen. 
All social order and all its machinery must serve 
the same great aim. For instance, fine art, the 
picture-gallery, the opera and the theatre, sys- 
tems of trade, tariffs, and commercial regula- 
tions, school systems and college systems, — all 
these at bottom must be administered and must 
be planned so that you may gain the highest pos- 
sible quality of manhood and of womanhood in 
all your citizens. I read every day discussions 



238 WHAT CAREER? 

of free trade and tariffs which make me sick. 
People argue as if the great object of our race 
were to make iron cheaper, or cotton cloth, or 
kerseys. You would think Magna Charta and 
the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, the American Revolution and the 
Civil War, had all been ordered that the price 
of calicoes might be low in comparison with the 
price of gold. Now, in truth, these great eras 
of human society, these martyr struggles of 
brave men, have had objects and results wor- 
thy of martyrdom. The State exists, and its 
methods are improved, with the one ^design, 
which is God's own design, of making manly 
men and womanly women. A true State adopts 
that system of revenue and protection which 
best develops and best educates every man, 
woman, and child born within her border. 

So I hear the new Art Education of England 
praised, which gives to every boy who will op- 
portunity to use rule, crayon, pencil, brush, and 
graver. I praise it. I hope we may see it here. 
But it is not because I care so much for the pat- 
terns of our calicoes or our paper-hangings. It 



WHAT CAREER? 239 

is because, for the child of God born yesterday 
in a hovel, I would have ready the best possible 
training for his best development ; that his soul 
and heart, his conscience and affections, the part 
of him which is infinite and immortal, may use 
the best tools child of God can use, and win the 
highest victory child of God can win : for this 
the State lays her designs. 

Your whole political or social problem of re- 
construction becomes thus a problem of moral 
education. That the land just now redeemed 
— a land which, though redeemed, is still a wil- 
derness — may blossom with the rose. How 
shall that be ? Never, but around the homes of 
womanly women ; never, but beneath the spade- 
blows of manly men. 

In the Old World, the Church timidly obeys 
the direction of the State in such affairs. It 
educates only a few choir-boys in Rome, because 
the Church needs no wider education. In other 
countries it goes further, as the temporal ruler 
may permit. But everywhere, outside of Switz- 
erland, the reign of classes must be maintained 
and taught, as the English Prayer-book sayF 



240 WHAT CAREER? 

"To do my duty in that state of life unto which 
it shall please God to call me." It is our higher 
blessing that with us the Church owns no earthly 
master. In the great work of bringing all to the 
stature of a perfect man, we know no let or hin- 
drance. In that great work, where Christ leads 
the way, of making men and women to be more 
like God, we may follow freely. We call the 
halt, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb. We 
will teach them all, encourage them all, uplift 
them all. We will inspire them all, so that no 
man shall be content with the state of life he is 
in to-day, but each man shall pray and strive to 
find himself nearer God to-morrow. We must 
consecrate them all, that no man shall say that 
any thing he has is his own, but rather that each 
man shall hold as a trustee for the highest good 
of all. The State will never be satisfied with 
any thing she has attained. She will always 
forget the thing that is behind ; and, always 
looking forward for worship more free, for com- 
munion more intimate, and for faith more firm, 
she will lift men to higher duty and success 
more abundant. Such men are each worth a 



WHAT CAREER? 241 

thousand Persian legionaries, worth a thousand 
frightened slaves. Those men live in the life 
of God. They breathe the spirit of God. They 
work with the help of God, beneath God's own 
direction. It is in answer to the prayers of 
women thus trained, and to the work of men 
thus inspired, that deserts, but just now dis- 
covered, become prosperous commonwealths, — 
that the prairie of yesterday is the harvest-field 
of to-day. Ah ! more than this : it will be when 
such men and such women control it, that the 
land just now wasted by slavery, and trodden 
down, fulfils the promises which God Almighty 
seemed to write on it in its soil and climate in 
the very beginning. 

And not till then ! 

It is rather more than half a century since 
this country, without knowing it, drifted into 
the great experiment of universal suffrage. The 
men of the American Revolution hardly dreamed 
of so bold a theory. They gave the suffrage 
only to those who had some permanent interest 
in the land. It was afterwards, by steps but 
little thought of, that the supreme power was 
11 



242 WHAT CAREER? 

given in equal shares to each man who lived 
under our sky. So soon as the country knew 
what it had done, the shrewd good sense of the 
country compelled the better school-education 
of the people, — of all the people. On that 
wave we have been swimming for fifty years. I 
do not say nor think that we have yet done the 
best we shall do in the line of mental education. 
But I hope we are learning a better lesson yet. 
I hope we are learning that what the people 
must have, if the land is to live, is moral educa- 
tion as the basis and ruling power of the whole. 
We must resolve on manhood and on woman- 
hood fit to use these athletic bodies and to 
direct these cultivated minds. The country 
must learn that this great word, " Education," 
means a great deal more than the training of 
men's wits. It means a great deal more than 
the training of their muscles. It means the 
training of the soul of man. Unless he is more 
than an athlete, unless he is more than a reader, 
writer, or reckoner, he is not fit to be trusted 
with the use of such instruments as body or 
mind. And the State will perish if it rely on 
his suffrage, or that of men like him. 



WHAT CAREER? 243 

For this moral training the Church, in its 
thousand organizations, is of course responsible. 
Yet the cool good sense of the people has been 
right in its demand that the ordained officers of 
the Church — meaning its formal functionaries 

— shall not interfere in the day-schools, lest 
they carry there their professional jealousies 
and bigotries : so much more religious, at the 
bottom, is the whole people, than any one clan 
or section is apt to be. This exclusion, how- 
ever, does not mean that the work of a common 
school, though it were a school for reading, 
writing, and arithmetic, shall not, first, last, and 
always — top, bottom, and middle — be devoted 
to making the boys manly and the girls womanly, 

— devoted all through to their moral training. 
It is the wisdom from on high which the land 
is after, and must have, if it is to be a nation. 
This wisdom is first pure, then peaceable and 
gentle ; it is full of mercy and good fruits ; it 
is without partiality and without hypocrisy. 
No wisdom is good for any thing which does 
not include this wisdom. And the schools and 
colleges are not worth even what the men are 



244 WHAT CAREER? 

paid who sweep their floors, if they do not 
inculcate this wisdom through and through. 
The old statement about Harvard College — if 
it be still true, as I hope it is, in the profoundest 
sense of the words — is founded on a complete 
appreciation of what a college is for. " It is 
not so much," men used to say half a century 
ago, " what things the college teaches, or what 
it does not teach. It is that it takes in every 
year fifty cubs, and sends out every year fifty 
gentlemen." If the gentleman be a gentleman 
according to St. James's standard, or St. Paul's, 
one could have no higher description of the 
work of a college. 

But I should have very little hope for the 
real moral education of the land, if I supposed 
it must be left on the chances of the schools of 
the land. When, with their eyes open, our 
fathers took the government of America out of 
the hands of the House of Brunswick, and took 
it on themselves, they really pledged themselves 
to God Almighty that the people of this land 
should, in every public ordinance and organiza- 
tion, be trained in their eternal life, — trained 



WHAT CAREER? 245 

to be kings and priests, as the Bible squarely 
puts it. In point of fact, a high-toned town 
meeting or ward meeting, under the true gov- 
ernment of a republic, is a school for the higher 
life, in which every day-laborer, sweating from 
the forge or dirty from the spade, may be lifted 
to higher life and conscientious duty. The 
theatre, when you can have stockholders or 
other owners who had rather die than that the 
State should suffer harm, may be made, often is 
made, a nurse for morals and the eternal life, 
whose successes any single church may envy. 
A high-toned journal, which would rather sink 
with its colors flying than wound a boy's purity, 
or puzzle an innocent girl by a coarse word, is 
one of the voices which, if only by its steady 
iteration, finds a way which no oracle could 
command. Then there are such lessons as 
those of Starr King, Orville Dewey, Wendell 
Phillips, and Waldo Emerson, in the lecture- 
room. A thousand people do not go to their 
homes after they have been hushed and en- 
tranced for an hour under the spell of one of 
these magicians, without seeing something of 



246 WHAT CAREER? 

the higher life ; yes, and entering where these 
men point the way. Such are some of the 
methods of the moral training of this people 
which their own good sense, working under the 
inspiration of a present God, have appointed 
and created. Thank God, then, the beginning 
need not be made ! But if this nation is to 
endure, if this country is to be a country worth 
living for and worth dying for, it needs vastly 
more than a beginning. This country needs to 
learn through and through, — from the Presi- 
dent and Governor at one end, round to the 
meanest pauper, whose taxes are paid for him by 
a liquor dealer, at the other end, — that behind 
and beneath its education in fine art, music, or 
drawing, geography, geology, history, reading, 
writing, and arithmetic, is its training in man- 
hood and womanhood, its moral education. As 
Mr. Speaker Long said so well the other day, a 
prison must be a place where the man who stole 
must be taught not to steal ; the man who drank 
must be taught not to drink. A Board of 
Overseers of the Poor must be a board which 
shall make unmanly men manly, and make 



WHAT CAREER? 247 

unwomanly women womanly. Excises are to 
be collected and tariffs levied on the principles 
of social life which shall best train men and 
women. Amusements are to be licensed or re- 
pressed, liquor is to be bought and sold, public 
lands are to be given away, emigration to be 
encouraged or repressed, on systems which shall 
make men and women purer and nobler. Gov- 
ernment is to learn that this is what government 
in the end is for. It is not to make people rich. 
It is not to make them comfortable merely. It 
is to make men who are worthy of the name of 
man, and women who are worthy of the name 
of woman. 

And we have all seen small communities, 
where we were close enough to the work of 
training to know that this was done, and to 
know how it was done. It has been well said 
of our small country towns, that they train the 
men and the women who are to lead the Bostons 
and the Chicagos. Where a whole community, 
led by its best members, rises in protest against 
every nuisance or cause of injury ; where every 
widow and orphan become the wards, so to 



248 WHAT CAREER? 

speak, uf the tenderness of the whole ; where 
society, almost of necessity, envelops and in- 
volves poor and rich, high and low, in one small 
and simple coterie or organism, — then good has 
its own chance to overcome evil, and light its 
own chance to dispel darkness. What a well- 
led village does, really so simply, is model or 
suggestion for what a great city might try for, 
and what, with its thousand advantages, it 
might attain, in some points, better than the 
little village. It does not become us who live 
in cities to fall in with the old complaint that 
they are always dangers to the common weal. 
In the outset of modern history, cities were the 
birthplace of freedom. 

We never come to any crisis in history — a 
war, a conflagration, or a great election — with- 
out wishing that we had done more in this work 
of training men ; without grieving for the 
chances we have lost, and rejoicing for the 
chances we have used. I heard a wise man from 
the West say last week that the tie which held 
the West to the East when the war came was, 
first of all, the result of the care with which 



WHAT CAREER? 249 

the East had built Western schools, churches, 
and colleges. I know that a year ago no man 
was sorry that he had helped honest men estab- 
lish their homes in Florida. Your crises in 
Washington — of silver, of greenbacks, of elec- 
toral colleges, of reconstruction, or of secession 
— all set you back to wishing, not that the 
nation were stronger in wealth, not that it were 
more highly educated in letters or in arts, but 
that it had more good men and women, that 
it had higher moral training. 

And the promise of the Saviour to his own 
was simply that they should triumph, because, 
as he said, they rested on the rock. " Your 
Father shall give you the kingdom." You are 
not to fear unless you lack in moral force. For 
all things are added to the moral power which 
that little flock supplies. At what moment it 
allies itself to the arm of flesh, it fails ; as in 
Italy the Church has failed because it chose to 
rule by soldiers and by statesmen. At what 
•moment it allies itself to the arts of the intellect, 
it fails ; as all Protestantism has always failed 
when it relied on its logical systems or its syllo- 
11* 



250 WHAT CAREER? 

gisms. But where and when it relies on truth, 
justice, righteousness, love, — then and there it 
succeeds. Other tilings round it crumble, burn 
to ashes, or blow away in dust ; but the pure 
gold stands. The land which trains its people 
in such eternal life endures. It is to such 
a land that God gives the kingdom. 



WHAT CAREER? 251 



EXERCISE. 

HTWO friends are in a boat in the Mozam- 
bique Channel. A sudden flaw of wind 
upsets the boat. Before they can right her, she 
fills with water, and sinks ; and the two men 
are swimming for their lives. " Ah, well ! " 
says one of them to the other, " it is a long pull 
to the shore ; but the water is warm, and we 
are strong. We will hold by each other, and all 
will go well." — " No," says his friend. " I have 
lost my breath already : each wave that strikes 
us knocks it from my body. If you reach the 
shore, — and God grant you may ! — tell my 
wife I remembered her as I died. Good-by ! 
God bless you ! " and he is gone. There is 
nothing his companion can do for him. For 
himself, all he can do is to swim, and then float, 
and rest himself, and breathe ; to swim again, 
and then float, and rest again, — hour after 



252 WHAT CAREEKV 

hour, to swim and float, swim and float, with 
that steady, calm determination that he will go 
home ; that no blinding spray shall stifle him, 
and no despair weaken him, — hour after hour, 
till at last the palm-trees show distinct upon the 
shore, and then the tall reeds, and then the 
figures of animals. Will one never feel bot- 
tom? Yes, at last his foot touches the coral, 
and with that touch he is safe. 

That story that man told me. 

Now, what is the difference between those 
two men ? Why does one give up the contest 
at once, and resign himself to what people call 
his fate, while the other fights the circumstances 
for hours, and wins the battle ? On shipboard 
one was as strong as the other ; he was as brave ; 
he was as prudent as the other. " What if he 
were?" you say. Strength and bravery and 
prudence were all needed in the crisis ; but 
something else was needed also. The man had 
never trained himself to swim. He knew how 
to swim, if knowing a method were of much 
use, where one has not trained himself to the 
habit. But that training he had never given. 



WHAT CAREER? 253 

Take that as a precise illustration, where no- 
body questions the answer, of the difference 
wrought in two men merely by exercise, or the 
steadiness of training. In matters like this, of 
pure bodily exercise, everybody sees and owns 
its work and its result. 

We are beginning in our time to acknowledge 
the same work and the same results in other 
victories and in their companion failures. A 
country town sends two men to the legislature, 
— one because he understands all about the 
flowing of the meadows on their river, which is 
the great interest of that year ; and another — 
well, because he has made a good speech at the 
town-meeting. But every one understands that 
the first is worth five times as much as the 
second, and that his opinion is of fivefold value. 
Yes, so it is, in a certain sense. But, when the 
great day comes, when that meadow business is 
to be explained to the House, our solid friend, 
laden with facts and figures, tries to explain it ; 
and he begins at the wrong end. He takes for 
granted just what the House does not know, 
and he tells them just what they do know. He 



254 WHAT CAREER? 

empties the hall; and he sits down, with his 
speech only half spoken, ready to weep for 
mortification. It is then that his fresh, good- 
natured, ready colleague whispers him out into 
a committee-room, takes the manuscript of the 
unspoken speech, and reads it ; fixes in his mind 
the four essential things, and makes sure that 
he is not confused about them ; goes back into 
the House ; waits till the right moment ; and 
then, just before the debate is closed, speaks for 
ten minutes only. And then, all this which 
was so dull becomes interesting to us all, and 
that which was so obscure becomes perfectly 
clear ; and the whole business of the meadows 
is set right for a century. What is the differ- 
ence between those two men? You have to 
confess there, that training, thorough exercise, 
applies not only to swimming and fencing, and 
playing the piano, and other matters of muscle 
and nerve, — it applies also, it seems, to memory 
and reasoning and imagination. It gives this 
young fellow confidence and presence of mind 
in face of an unfriendly audience, just as it 
gave the other confidence and perseverance in 



WHAT CAREER? 255 

face of blinding spray. Whatever memory is, 
whether it be, as I suppose it is, simply a me- 
chanical adjustment of fibres of the brain, or 
whether it be some inexplicable process of the 
spirit, — whatever the faculty of reasoning is, 
and whatever the faculty of the imagination is, 
— you find on any field-day, when the several 
recruits of God's army are reviewed, that those 
who have been exercised or drilled in the use of 
their faculties are, in that very training, the su- 
periors of those who have let such drilling or exer- 
cise go by. And so of other mental powers. 

It is when we leave the domains of reasoning, 
of memory, or imagination, and come into lines 
of life even more difficult, if they be more 
familiar, that people begin to talk wildly, and 
fail to understand what one of the masters 
meant when he spoke of those " who have their 
faculties trained to the knowledge of good 
and evil." Granted that swimming must be 
learned ; granted that the arts of the orator 
must be learned. Yes ; but people say, care- 
lessly, that every man knows the difference be- 
tween right and wrong; and therefore it is said 



256 WHAT CAREER? 

there is no need of training there. " We are 
outside the domain of the body," it is said. 
" We are in the impalpable and viewless domain 
of the spirit." Impalpable and viewless, — 
granted ; but not without law because viewless 
and impalpable. The great law of life comes 
in there as everywhere, that u practice makes 
perfect," and that nothing else makes perfect. 
It is not enough to know the right. That poor 
fellow who sank in the Mozambique Channel 
knew how to swim ; but he had not that steady 
familiarity with the water, and that godlike 
confidence in his own power, which comes from 
practice in swimming, and from that alone. 
That worthy man who broke down before his 
audience knew what he wanted to say ; nay, it 
was all written on the paper in his hand ; nay, 
between his tears of mortification, he could tell 
it all to the other when they retired. What he 
wanted was not the knowledge of the thing, but 
practice, habit, and experience in saying it. 
And these simple illustrations are enough to 
show how fatuous and short-sighted is the cool, 
off-hand statement which says, that, because we 



WHAT CAREER? 257 

all know the right, we shall, of course, equal 
each other in our capacity for doing it in an 
emergency. 

Dr. Watts struck on the true statement when 
he described those 

" Who know what's right ; not only so, 
But also jorac-TiSE what they know." 

One of our most distinguished teachers, the 
late Francis Gardner, said, that in the case of 
two thousand or more boys who had passed 
under his care, no parent forgave him if he said, 
" Your boy is not quick or bright ; but he is 
thoroughly pure and true and good." They 
did not forgive him for saying so, because they 
took it for granted that the goodness could be 
attained in any odd hour or so ; but the bright- 
ness or quickness seemed of much larger im- 
portance. On the other hand, if the teacher 
said, " Your boy learns every lesson, and recites 
it well ; he is at the head of his class, and will 
take any place he chooses in any school," nine 
parents, he said, out of ten, were satisfied, though 
he should have to add, " I wish I were as sure 
that he were honest, pure, and unselfish. But in 



258 WHAT CAREER? 

the truth the other boys do not like him ; and I 
am afraid there is something wrong." To that 
warning, he said, people reply, " Ah, well, I was 
a little wild myself when I was a boy. That 
will all come right in time." " Will come 
right," as if that were the one line of life which 
took care of itself, which needed no training ; 
the truth being, that this is the only thing which 
does not come right in time. It is the one thing 
which requires eternity for its correction, if the 
work of time have not been eagerly and care- 
fully, and with prayer, wrought through. 

When, then, we say, as we have to say so 
often, that one of two men has been taken for a 
higher preferment, has been promoted to a no- 
oler career, and that the other has been left, or, 
so to speak, set aside, we are sure to find, if we 
can only reach a high enough point of view to 
look down on the map or ground-plan of the two 
lives, that there has been a very sufficient " law 
of selection," which has governed the taking or 
the rejection. The man who learned to swim 
has swum. The man who learned to speak has 
spoken. And it is as true that the man who 



WHAT CAREER? 259 

Las trained his conscience assiduously and loy- 
ally, as a man of honor does, is not tempted, no, 
not a hair's breadth, by any thing which un- 
trained men call temptation. This is simply as 
a truly trained gentleman does not so much as 
think of the possibility of saying what is not 
true. 

The truth is that exercise is just as essential 
in the creation of character or its preservation 
as it is in accomplishments, whether of mind or 
of body. In simpler times, this was owned in 
the forms of familiar language ; and in such 
times daily " exercise " was the chief business 
of th-3 man. King Richard, Cceur de Lion, 
did not expect to maintain his prowess without 
steady exercise in the arts which went to it. 
Because he rode well when he was a squire, he 
did not give up his daily exercise in riding when 
he was knight or when he was king. Because, 
the day he was knighted, he could strike his 
adversary's helmet in tilting, he did not suppose 
he could keep his hand in practice unless the 
steady exercise of the tilting-yard, regularly and 
of system, added to the education of his I toy* 



260 WHAT CAREER? 

hood . What was at first a difficult accomplish- 
ment became thus an easy feat, then a matter of 
course, and, last, an unconscious habit or knack 
of hand, arm, foot, and eye. But he would have 
lost the habit had he lost the daily exercise. 

This is just what they meant, therefore, in 
such simpler times, when they say that a man 
was a proficient in all manly exercise, or that he 
kept up his daily exercises of piety and prayer, 
or that he exercised himself in conversation, in 
argument, in poetry, or in oratory. 

In our time, for better, for worse, we have 
undertaken to transfer the business of education 
from youthful and mature life, and throw it all 
upon children. A girl of seventeen tells you 
that she has " finished her education ; " and a 
boy of fourteen tells you that he hopes to finish 
his next week, so that he may " go into a store." 

If it be understood on all hands that this 
change is only a change in the use of that word 
" education," why, there is no reason to com- 
plain. In Milton's time, in Raleigh's time, edu- 
cation meant the steady unfolding of all that 



WHAT CAREER? 261 

there is manly in man and womanly in woman. 
It was, therefore, steady advance from knowl- 
edge to higher knowledge, from capacity to 
higher capacity, from life to higher life. It 
meant the leading along the baby till he became 
the quick, honest, and fearless boy; the leading 
along the boy till he became the true, simple, 
and modest youth ; the leading along the youth 
till he became the hardy, brave, and unselfish 
man ; the leading along the man till he could 
put the stamp of age on what manhood had 
mined ; and then it meant the leading along of 
this ripened man from this life to another life 
which is higher. That was what the word " ed- 
ucation " used to mean. No harm, if we choose 
now to apply it only to certain exercises of 
childhood, of text-book, and of school-room, if 
we are well aware that we have shifted its old 
sense. Then we shall provide some other word 
for a great necessity. The necessity is for boy, 
girl, man, or woman to keep all of good that 
they have gained, and to gain more. This ne- 
cessity compels their daily exercise. 

One would be glad to illustrate this in the 



262 WHAT CAREER? 

discussion of details, which would require more 
space than can be here given to them. This 
must be said, on the central principle involved, 
— we are all, in a large degree, slaves to what 
is called the " division of labor." The shoe- 
maker, it is said, therefore, need know nothing 
of farming, nor the farmer of the making of 
shoes. To this division nobody will object, so 
long as it is held within its legitimate limits. 
But it certainly passes those limits, if it prevent 
any man daily from getting fair exercise in each 
of the three great subdivisions of human life. 
Each man must have, every day, exercise in 
bodily strength, in intellectual accomplishments, 
and in moral and spiritual life. He lias no right 
to commit suicide of one set of faculties more 
than another. He has no more right so to live 
that his intellectual faculties shall die out of 
him, or his spiritual faculties shall die out of 
him, than he has to take the slow poison, or to 
strike the coward blow by which his bodily 
faculties shall die. 

The life of each man must have, every day, 
its fair share of physical, of mental, and of 



WHAT CAREER? 263 

moral exercise. Retaining these great classes, 
you may subdivide them as you please. You 
may take for your bodily culture your exercise 
in your garden and orchard, and in travelling to 
and fro, and leave to other men the building of 
your house and barns, and the cultivation of 
your food ; but full bodily exercise you must 
have. Or I may take such branch of mental 
culture as I please, and leave to other men the 
rest. They may study the stars, may discuss 
politics, may pore over past history, while I con- 
tent myself with some simpler walk ; but some 
walk or other of mental culture I must have. 
So I may leave to other men their peculiar pref- 
erences in spiritual life. They may sit wrapt 
in meditation on the unseen glories of an unseen 
God, while I am playing jack-straws on the floor 
with my children ; but some spiritual exercise, 
exercise of the affections, I must have. There 
is no division of labor which will enable me to 
save my soul by proxy. 

The definition of exercise, then, is a threefold 
matter ; and we are not to consider the subject 



264 WHAT CAREER? 

as if it related simply to the gymnasium, or the 
training of the body. 

I can only attempt this general classification, 
simply calling attention once more to the close- 
ness of the relations which bodily exercise, men- 
tal exercise, and the exercise of the affections 
bear to each other. It is, of course, impossible 
to lay down rules for all readers. 

The man whose daily vocation is active em- 
ployment in the open air has his bodily exercise 
largely provided for. He needs to consider and 
plan rather for his exercises of mind and soul. 

On the other hand, the man or woman whose 
constant duty is intellectual, who is engaged on 
books or figures, needs to plan out physical ex- 
ercise with special effort ; and also must see all 
the time that, in the daily duty, there is room 
and chance for the exercises of faith, of hope, 
and of love. 

" We do not pay much attention to arithmetio 
in our schools," said some Japanese gentlemen, 
not long ago. " We think arithmetic makes 
men sordid." Perhaps it does ; perhaps it does 
not. Whether it does or does not depends on 



WHAT CAREER? 265 

the amount of " exercise " of the affections, 
which is mingled with the intellectual training. 

Of the physical exercises, it is more pleasant 
to speak than it was twenty years ago. The 
war has called attention to the scandalous neg- 
lect of them which was prevalent before. This 
nation called together a chosen army of seventy- 
five thousand men when the war began. The 
advance on Bull Run proved that those picked 
men could only move six miles a day in their 
first advance upon their enemy ; this after near 
three months of discipline in camp. Compare 
that against a well-authenticated story of the 
movement of one of Wellington's divisions, 
which, in twenty-four hours, marched sixty 
miles in Spain ; or compare it with Gen. Ord's 
advance in the last week of the war, when 
Sheridan telegraphed that, if things were 
pushed, the end had come. Grant replied, 
" Push things ; " and then he pushed them. 

Physical exercise is beginning to be expected 
tti: young men and young women. The time 
may come when it shall be respectable for men 
and women past thirty. 



266 WHAT CAREER. 

For persons whose daily business is sedentary- 
exercise of the body seems to come in more easily 
in the line of their amusements. Spirited games, 
in simple times and simple nations, filled out a 
great necessity. The illustration of the game of 
croquet, which keeps people in the open air, shows 
what such amusements can do. An English- 
man's shootiug and riding after the hounds have 
had a great deal to do with the fine physical 
health of the upper classes among the English. 
The constitution is inherited even by girls born 
from such fathers ; and the taste for open-air 
exercise continues in the next generation, even 
with women who would consider it unwomanly 
to shoot, or, perhaps, to ride after the hounds. 
Cricket, as it is played by the cricket-clubs, is 
reduced to too solemn a game to be of much use 
as amusement or as exercise. But the cricket 
of a village-green, where there is not much 
science, and where there is a great deal of fun, 
answers a much better purpose. Base-ball has 
much more amiable qualities. With us, it is 
just now being ruined by the American ex- 
travagances, which make it what people call a 



WHAT CAREER? 267 

%< sporting game," a game of "professionals," as 
the popular slang calls them. Still, we ought 
not to permit the gamblers to drive us from an 
amusement which is our right. The fair devel- 
opment of this game is doing a good deal to res- 
cue open-air amusements from their degradation. 

Women have not paid as much attention to 
base-ball as perhaps they will. A > great master 
in open-air games tells me that our women do 
not know the resource and amusement, for coun- 
try or for indoor life, of battle-door and shuttle- 
cock. He tells me that there are, at least, eight 
varieties of this game, some of them highly com- 
plicated, which may be played by a party of 
thirty people together. It has, of course, the 
great advantage of giving thorough exercise to 
chest, neck, and arms. 

The same advantage is to be found in sweep- 
ing: if the windows of the room be open, the 
exercise of sweeping can hardly be rivalled. I 
am not sure whether I am to speak of it as 
amusement. It is certainly recreation. 

Mr. Nathaniel Parker Willis, who, with a very 
delicate constitution, led a literary life, and main- 



268 WHAT CAREER/ 

tained himself in active pursuits, gave his ver- 
dict for horseback riding as the physical exercise 
most profitable for literary men. It gives air, 
chance for command, and exercise for lungs and 
arms. No one who thoroughly enjoys riding 
will dissent from him ; but there are those who 
do not enjoy it. There is also one serious draw- 
back on it which affects many of us, namely, that 
it always requires the existence and presence of 
a horse. Granting the horse, the horseman or 
horsewoman needs also a companion ; for there 
is danger that the solitary horseman will carry 
his ledger with him in the front of his head and 
repeat his calculations as he rides, or turn over 
again that ugly letter which he received from a 
disappointed correspondent, or plan out for the 
tenth time the closing argument by which he is 
to reply to the defendant's counsel after they 
have closed. Granting the horse, granting good 
companionship, granting a good seat, and a pleas- 
ant day, a horseback ride certainly does unite all 
the requisites for healthful exercise. 

Military drill stands very high among the 
various manly exercises. If the women secure 



WHAT CAREER? 269 

the ballot, of course it will rank among womanly 
exercises ; for it is very clear that no one should 
give a vote which, when the time comes, she is 
not prepared to defend. The special advantage 
is that the tired brain rests almost wholly, while 
the manual of arms, or the marching under orders, 
goes on. The recruit is wholly free from respon- 
sibility. I recollect the short periods of my own 
military service as periods of almost complete 
rest, though I was in high bodily activity. Such 
a comfort for an hour, or indeed for a series of 
hours, to have another man take the weight of 
direction! In the ancient systems of Greece 
and Rome, as in the training of Richard and 
of Raleigh, these exercises found important 
place. 

The various schools of gymnastic exercises 
oiay safely be left to explain their own proc- 
esses, — the heavy weights, the light weights, 
and the German gymnasia. This is certain, that 
a?.l arrangements should be as social as possible ; 
and that the arrangements which most resemble 
those of a family, bringing together all ages and 
both sexes, are, so far, the best of all. And let 



270 WHAT CAREER? 

us avoid the exaggerations which the teachers 
fall into. What we want is rightly to divide 
effort, that spirit, soul, and body may be trained. 
In the lives of most of us, great promptness and 
celerity are the qualities most desirable. As I 
once heard Mr. Starr King say : " I do not want 
to lift eight hundred pounds ; I never did want 
to. I do not want to be trained to draw three 
tons on the high road. What I want is to be 
able to go at 2.40." 

Mr. Webster, who was a great worker, used 
to say that he could do more in six hours than 
he could in eight. He meant that, by rightly 
throwing in two hours of exercise in the open 
air, — fishing in the bay at Marshfield, or fol- 
lowing a trout-brook at Boscawen, — he could 
make the remaining six hours of more use than 
all the eight together. That system was the 
secret of the Greek and Roman physical train- 
ing. Physical training was not a thing for boys 
alone, but for men, and, in Sparta, for women 
also. 

In our climate, and in all climates milder than 
ours, swimming, for the season when it is prac- 



WHAT CAREER? 271 

ticable, seems the exercise most efficient for men 
and for women. I believe it is still against the 
law for any person to go into the waters which 
wash the city of Boston. But as the city has 
provided bathing-places in which a hundred 
thousand people freely bathed last year, I sup- 
pose we may consider that ordinance virtually 
repealed. And we who live in Boston must 
look on the arrangement most gratefully, as the 
beginning of a system for hearty and sensible 
physical exercise of the people. 

To speak of mental exercises in detail is to 
go over the whole compass of study involved in 
liberal culture. To discuss such "exercises," 
retaining the use of the word as it would have 
been familiar to Raleigh or to Milton, is the 
work not of the end of an essay, but of a 
volume. 

Such a discussion I hope to enter upon — 
although only in an elementary way — in the 
next volume of this little series. 

THE END. 



HOW TO DO IT. 

By EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 

CONTENTS. 

How to Talk ; How to Write ; How to Read ; How to |p 
into Society ; How to Travel ; Life at School and in Vacation; 
Life Alone ; Habits with Children ; Life with your Elders j 
Habits of Reading , Getting Ready. 

i6mo. Price $i.oo. 

" The little work is intended especially for the benefit of young readers, 
but it is equally adapted to give pleasure to the older members of the family 
circle. It is weighty in thought, of acute observation, versatile in its illus- 
trations and examples, affectionate in tone, and racy in expression." — 
N. Y. Tribune. 

" This is a very sensible little book. ' How to Do It ' means ' how you 
are to behave in society,' ' how you are to read,' ' how you are to live with 
your elders,' and ' how with children,' &c. On all these points Mr. Hale 
gives very shrewd, kindly advice. The first chapter, with its description 
and reminiscences of Boston as it was, will charm every reader and tempt 
him to go further, when indeed he can scarcely fail to get much good." — 
London Spectator. 

" It is a mistake to suppose this charming, amusing, and useful little 
book is only for young people. It is equally needed by multitudes oi 
people who have less knowledge than years ; parents who do n» \ know 
* how to do it ' any better than their sons and daughters ; men and women, 
well informed in current matters of interest, but who do not know how to 
read, or write, or talk, or travel, or go into society, or even behave at church, 
in a proper manner. Let them get this book, and Mr. Hale, in his quaint, 
humorous, attractive, and sensible way, will tell them exactly how to do aU 
these things, and more. His pages are crowded with good sense and prac- 
tical wisdom, and bright with anecdote and story, with pleasant talk and 
words of cheer, which not only show how to do it, but are sure to teach 
courage to the timid, and modesty to the self-sufficient, in doing it." — 
Univsrsalist Quarterly. 

« 

Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, by the Pidh 
Ushers, 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



MR. HALE'S BOY BOOKS. 



Stories of War, 

Told by Soldiers. 

STORIES OF THE SEA, 

Told by Sailors. 

Stories of adventure, 

Told by Adventurers. 

Stories of Discovery, 

Told by Discoverers* 

STORIES OF INVENTION, 

Told by Inventors 



Collected and edited by Edward E. Hale. i6mo, 
cloth, black and gold. Price, $1.00 per volume. 

For sale by all booksellers, or mailed, post-paid % oft. 
receipt of price by the Publishers, 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

Boston. 



TEN TIMES ONE SERIES. 



FOUR AND FIVE. 

A STORY OF A LEND-A-HAND CLUB. 
By EDWARD E. HALE, 

AUTHOR OF " TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN," " IN HIS NAME," " MRS. MERRIAM's 
SCHOLARS," "HOW TO DO IT," ETC. 

16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 



Dr. Hale's style is so well-known that it seems unnecessary to say more of 
one of his books than to announce its issue. The friends of the "Ten Times 
One is Ten " series will find this latest volume equally delightful with the others. 
Four boys of the "Lend-a-Hand" club camp one summer in the Kaatskills, 
and, in addition to trout-fishing and hunting, find time to practically illustrate 
their club name in various neighborly acts of kindness for the mountaineers. 
The first summer one new member is added, and each one enrolls a new member 
for the following summer. Thus doubling its membership, the work of the club 
in camp reunion each summer, and in various schools and towns in winter, is 
traced for four years, making a very bright and interesting story. — Public 
Opinion. 

Stories about woodland camps are always of interest to boys, and Dr. Edward 
Everett Hale knows how to write and touch the innermost chord of sympathy in 
young hearts. The Wadsworth mottoes and their work form the theme of Dr. 
Hale's latest story, " Four and Five." The delightful camp, the ice-boat race, 
the stories of the incidents in various parts of the world, the formation of the 
club all go to make up a very readable story. Every boy will be benefited by it. 
— Boston Times. 

A new volume has been published in Edward Everett Hale's popular "Ten 
Times One " series which is entitled " Four and Five. A story of a Lend-a-Hand 
Club." The storyis imbued with all that strong, fresh, original, and helpful style 
for which the distinguished author is so famous, and which has made him so 
immense a favorite with young people, as well as with all older readers. Several 
interesting incidents occur during their camping times in which they splendidly 
carry out their lend-a-hand principle, and carry substantial aid and joy to the 
unfortunate. The story throughout is instinct with the brightest spirit, while the 
mottoes of the club are illustrated in a way to make it eminently helpful to 
every boy and girl in the land. — Boston Home Journal. 



Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
Price by the Publishers, 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



Mr. Tangier's Vacations. 

A NOVEL. 
By EDWARD E. HALE, 

AUTHOR OF "IN HIS NAME," " THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY," ETC. 

i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.25 ; Paper covers, 50 cents. 



The Rev. E. E. Hale tells of "Mr. Tangier's Vacations," of what a young 
overworked lawyer did in the village where he went to seek rest for a tired 
brain. Of course the book has a purpose, — the one great and beautiful purpose for 
which Mr. Hale has lived and preached and written and talked all his life, — to 
induce people to help each other, to work together in order to make life better, 
more sunny, and happier in every way for all sorts and conditions of men. 

The love stories in the book are delightful : the love is so manly and honest, so 
sweet and so true. In these are found again the worth of the being together. That 
word is the summing up of the story, as it is also the one that solves many of the 
riddles of life, that cures many of its sorrows, and lifts one above many of its 
annoyances. 

Mr. Hale is always a preacher of help, health, hope, and happiness. He 
makes a man thankful that he is not alone in the world, but is one of the people; 
he makes him glad of his social duties, and hearty in fulfilling them ; he teaches 
lovely home life, friendly neighborly life, good citizenship, practical Christianity, — 
in fact, there is nothing good which Mr. Hale does not teach. — Mrs. Goddard, 
in the Worcester Spy. 

It is a specially cheerful, helpful, and inspiriting book, dealing with the re- 
newed health and novel interests found in his vacations by a worn-out business 
man, who at last comes to realize the sound truth of Mr. Webster's maxim that 
a man can do more work in eight months than he can in twelve. On a slender 
thread of story, in which are twisted two love affairs, Mr. Hale has hung many 
sensible reflections on the true relations between city and country life, on ways to 
promote sociability, on questions of schools and music and the summer boarder. 

— Home yournal. 

*' Mr. Tangier's Vacations," by Edward Everett Hale, is one of the brightest, 
wisest, and happiest books that have yet been written by that versatile author. 
We feel while we read it, or rather while we are carried along by it as by a sea- 
ward-flowing river, that there is nothing which he might not do if he only willed 
it. The gift of clear and rapid writing, which he possesses beyond any living 
American, would be a dangerous one if it were not fully under his control. But 
he has mastered it, partly by his sinewy sense, which will not allow him to wander 
from his object, and partly by his resolute taste, which disdains mere fluency. No 
one can write more compactly or more curtly than he when concision is needed. 

— R. H. Stoddard, in Mail and Express. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
Price, by the publishers, 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



IN HIS NAME. 

A Story of the Waldenses, Seven Hundred Years Ago. 

Ellustrateiu 

By EDWARD E. HALE. 

l6mo, cloth, 129 illustrations by G. P. Jacomb-Hood. 

PRICE, ©1.35. 




It deals with the Waldenses, reads like a troubadour song, as the late 
Mrs. Jackson said, and fully deserves the holiday dress in which it is now 
brought out. The book will delight all readers who understand integrity, 
purity, and good-sense; it is historically accurate; it is a jewel, both as a 
work of art and in ethics; and it is good holiday reading. — Beacon. 



LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



Cbe «lorld Beautiful 

By LILIAN WHITING 



I know of no volumes of sermons published in recent years which 
are so well fitted to uplift the reader, and inspire all that is finest and 
best in his nature, as are the series of essays entitled "The World 
Beautiful," by Lilian Whiting. — B. O. Flower, in The Coming Age. 



Cbe CClorld Beautiful (first Series) 

i6mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. 
Comprising : The World Beautiful j Friendship ; 
Our Social Salvation $ Lotus Eating ; That 
which is to Come. 

The world beautiful about which she writes is no far-off event to 
which all things move, but the every-day scene around us filled by a 
6pirit which elevates and transforms it. — Prof. Louis J . Block, in 
The Philosophical Journal. 

No one can read it without feeling himself the better and richer 
and happier for having done so. — The Independent. 

Cbe Cdorld Beautiful (Second Seriee) 

i6mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. 
Comprising : The World Beautiful j Our Best 
Society ; To Clasp Eternal Beauty $ Vibra- 
tions ; The Unseen World. 

The style is at once graceful and lively. Every touch is fresh. — 
Zions Herald. 

Cbe CClorld Beautiful (Cbird Series) 

i6mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. 
Comprising : The World Beautiful ; The Rose 
of Dawn ; The Encircling Spirit-World ; The 
Ring of Amethyst ; Paradisa Gloria. 
The thoughtful reader who loves spiritual themes will find these 
pages inspiring. — Chicago Inter-Ocean 



NEW EDITION 
By MABEL LOOMIS TODD 

WITH INTRODUCTION BY 

Professor DAVID P. TODD, of Amherst College 

Author of " Stars and Telescopes" Etc. 

With numerous illustrations* t6mo. Cloth* Price, $1,00 



THE New Edition includes an account of the expe- 
ditions sent out by different governments, astro- 
nomical associations, and private parties to observe the total 
eclipse of the sun on August, 1896, in Norway, Nova Zembla, 
Siberia, and Japan; also the observations of the eclipse of 
January, 1898, in India. 

The volume also embraces the following chapters : Eclipses 
and Eclipse Tracks in General; Description of a Total 
Eclipse; Minor Phenomena — Intramercurian Planets; 
The Solar Prominences; The Corona; Eclipses in the 
Remote Past; Mediaeval and Later Eclipses (A. D. 5 to 
1842); Modern Eclipses (1842-1880); Recent Eclipses (1882- 
1893) ; Eclipses and the Telegraph ; Automatic Eclipse 
Photography; The Prediction of Eclipses — Selecting Sta- 
tions — Future Eclipses. There is also a list of eclipses, past 
and future, with charts, as well as biographic sketches and an 
index. 

The amount of accurate information collected within the covers of 
this little volume is very great, and the setting forth thereof, with the aid 
of maps, diagrams, and cuts, leaves little to be desired. Mrs. Todd has 
chosen for her subject one of the most fascinating chapters of astronomical 
science; and even the specialist in eclipses, unless his reading is close up 
to date, may find matters of interest in this excellent little treatise. — Tht 
Dial. 



LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., Publishers 
254 Washington Street, Boston 



The Man Without a Country 

BY 

EDWARD EVERETT HALE 



New Edition^ With a preface giving an account of the 
circumstances and incidents of its publication, and a 
new introduction by the author in the year of the war 
with Spain. i6mo. Cloth. 50 cents. 

Illustrated Edition, With forty pictures by Frank T. 
Merrill. Square 8vo. Cloth. 75 cents. 

The Story of the Man without a Country will be remem- 
bered and read as long as the American flag flies, and it will 
continue to do good to successive generations of young 
Americans. . . . What a splendid work of imagination and 
patriotism that story is ! Its theme is vital, and consequently 
its influence is perennial. — New York Sun {Editorial), 

It is so full of a lofty patriotism, so full of subtle sug- 
gestions that would mean nothing to a foreigner but that 
move our hearts strangely, that to read it is to grow prouder 
than ever of the country and the flag. — Cincinnati Com- 
mercial Gazette. 

The moral of the story may be found in Nolan's own pitiful 
words to a young sailor : " And for your country, boy, and for that 
flag, never dream a dream but of serving her as she bids you, though 
the service carry you through a thousand hells. No matter what 
happens to vou, no matter who flatters you or who abuses you, never 
look at another flag, never let a night pass but you pray God to bless 
that flag. Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do 
with, behind officers and government and people even, there is the 
country herself, your country, and that you belong to her as you 
belong to your own mother." 

LITTLE, BROWN, &f COMPANY, Publishers 
254 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, MASS. 



IAN 2 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnoloqies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVAT.ON 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



